Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice
by Lorata
Summary: Before she was Lyme, she was Madeline, an angry little girl who needed to learn to fight. Part of my exploration of victors before they were victors, and how the Centre works to make its killers. COMPLETE.
1. Chapter 1: Madeline

When Madeline's Pa was a boy, the artisan he sold his finished stone to tried to cut his prices, knowing Pa had nowhere else to go and no one to sell it to, not without losing the extra on transit. Pa couldn't stop him, so he did the next best thing: he found the man's pretty, naive daughter and stuck it to her out behind the back of the shop one night, with nothing more than a stolen blanket and a handful of half-melted candles to set the mood.

Seven months later she showed up at his door, big-bellied and black-eyed and sobbing. He hadn't thought she'd been old enough for that, but turns out old enough to look like that - old enough to do what they did - and apparently that's all the miracle of life needed. Lucky for him there'd been a drop in Panem's fertility rate that decade and the government was awarding stipends to new families, so they got married at the courthouse. Pa got enough money to buy that diamond-tipped saw he'd been working on, and Mama got saved from a life of disgrace.

It's the first bedtime story Madeline learns by heart. She even knows to stop and spit onto the ground at every mention of her granddaddy, a monster she's never met.

"And you, little girl," is how it always ends, Pa's callused finger pointing at her face, "you'd better be grateful, because I could've let you and your Mama starve to death in the streets. I could've let your Mama be passed around the rail yard like so much trash instead of making her an honest woman. But I didn't, because I'm a decent human being, and you best not forget that."

"No, Pa," Madeline says dutifully, standing straight with her chin up and her hands at her sides.

"That's right," Pa says with satisfaction, leaning back in his chair. "Now you do your job, little missy, and grow up pretty so we can find some rich idiot to trade you to when you're old enough."

She doesn't know what most of the story means until later. She just knows it makes Mama's mouth go thin if she's in the room.

* * *

When she's very small, too small to count past her fingers, Madeline keeps saying her name wrong. The last 'n' is hard, it sticks in her nose and it sounds wrong, all thin and nasty like a sneer. 'M' sounds better, softer and warmer, and 'Made-lime' is both easier for her to wrap her mouth around and nicer in her ears.

It's not like she has any friends who aren't imaginary yet, and so Madeline gets away with it until the day Pa catches her building a tower of blocks and singing to herself (_Made-lime, Made-lime, bestest person all the time_) and gives her a sharp smack across the palm with a ruler. "You're old enough to get your name right," he snaps at her while Madeline stares up at him, eyes wide, the block tower scattered all over the floor.

She can't say the letter 's' right either, and he cures her the same way. By the time she's three, Madeline enunciates clearer than most kids three times her age. Adults compliment her on it all the time, how grown up she sounds, and she smiles at them and says 'thank you' and hides her hand behind her back.

* * *

Madeline's one of the only kids at school without brothers or sisters. She was a hard birth, Mama told her when she asked; Mama was young and Madeline came out kicking and screaming, and the doctors almost lost them both.

"Lost us where?" Madeline asks once. She's five years old.

"Far away," Mama says. "Over the mountains, past the district boundary. We never would've come back. We were lucky, but they told Pa not to try to give me another baby or it'd happen for sure."

Madeline frowns and picks at a loose seam at the hem of her skirt before Mama slaps her hand away. Fabric is expensive, and Madeline has a habit of ruining everything she touches. "Why did you let Pa give you a baby if it was dangerous?"

Mama laughs, low and dark, and it's not a nice sound. It makes the hairs on Madeline's arms stand up. "Oh, baby girl, I didn't have a choice."

There's a rock in her throat and spiders in her blood, and Madeline fights to sound normal. "You mean a boy can just give you a baby and you can't say no?"

Mama hesitates. "There are ways to get rid of it before it's too late," she says carefully, "but they're dangerous. You better stay away from boys altogether until your Pa says it's okay."

That night Madeline sneaks into Pa's workshop and steals a chisel, crouching down in the darkness and striking the edge until she wears it to a point. She keeps it under her pillow when she sleeps and straps it to her leg under her skirt when she leaves the house. No boys will be giving her babies without her knowing about it.

* * *

She learns early the different ways of being afraid, the ones that are useless and the ones that make sense, the ones she can stop and the ones she can't. She learns the things it's smart to be afraid of whether she is or not.

Madeline is afraid of thunder first, when she's really little, too little to know better. Pa laughs and smacks his leg when the booms rattle the house and Madeline gasps and tries to hide under the blanket. He tells her thunder can't touch her, though if she's stupid enough to go outside during a storm the lightning might get her. Madeline hates being laughed at but it does help, because she's never afraid of thunder again. She sits right by the window and snarls at the flashes of light as they turn the air white, daring them to hit her, but they can't. It's the first time Madeline feels powerful.

She's afraid of babies. They're tiny and wet and needy and they scream and cry and drool and ruin people's lives and you can't give them back when someone gives them to you. The first time one of Mama's friends comes over she tries to hand her baby to Madeline - tries to trick her, obviously thinking she's too young to understand the rules - but Madeline knows better and so she scrambles back and runs away. Mama scolds her, her friend chuckles, and Madeline lets out a breath of relief. After that, whenever people with babies are around she makes sure to drop things and break them and run into them so they know babies aren't safe with her. People stop trying to hand her babies, so that's that one safe, but Madeline still can't quite erase the fear.

She's not afraid of the tools in Pa's workshop, even though he tells her all the ways she could mangle herself if she used them wrong. He tells her stories of men without fingers, with bashed-up hands, how if you slice your thumb off with the right kind of saw you don't even feel it until you pass out from the blood. But Madeline just narrows her eyes and listens to Pa when he gives her the safety rules, and soon enough he lets her help him work the ashlar.

Madeline is not afraid of Pa, even though she should be.

She knows she should be because Mama is, and Mama is older and knows best and Madeline should listen to her. There are lots of things about Pa to be afraid: his big stomping steps through the house when he's mad; the way he likes to pick up a ruler or a big spoon and slap it against his hand, or hold his belt in a loop and snap it tight, when he's using his angry voice. Mama tells Madeline she should be, tugs her down by the arm and holds her tight until her fingers dig into Madeline's skin and leave red marks, tells her she needs to stop looking Pa in the eye when he gets in one of his moods or she'll get in trouble.

Madeline tries her best. The next time Pa comes home from work mad - some customer tried to cheat him, he says - and starts slamming things around the house, Madeline digs deep inside her, searches for the fear she feels when she looks at babies, the fear that makes Mama's face turn white and her eyes go big, and for a second she thinks she hits it. Her stomach lurches and her blood goes hot except it's not fear, it's not fear at all, it's something else. Something that turns her hands into fists and makes her clench her teeth so hard her jaw hurts and her chin shakes.

When Pa storms into the room, Madeline stares up at him, her eyes hard and determined. Pa stops and glares down at her. "What are you looking at, little girl?" he demands.

"We're not the customer," Madeline says, clear and distinct and hissing on the letter 's' with her tongue safely behind her teeth just like he taught her. "You shouldn't get mad at us. It's not our fault."

Pa stares at her, shock and fury turning his mouth into a big 'o', and he takes a step. There, finally, is fear, just for a second, running through Madeline like a lightning strike, but she holds still, pretends she's a big tree rooted in the ground and he can't move her. Finally Pa stops and points his finger at her face like he always does. "If you weren't a girl," he says, letting the sentence trail off, and then off he goes, his feet making the pictures on the wall shake.

Madeline lets out a long breath, and her legs only wobble a little.

* * *

The thing is, she doesn't like Mama that much either. Madeline hates the way Mama cringes when Pa's around - she's convinced that Pa is like mountain lions, if you gasp and run they'll chase you, but if you stare them down and wave your arms and throw rocks at them they'll leave - and the way Mama always makes excuses for him. The first time Madeline walked in and saw Mama holding a towel full of ice to her face she felt bad, but then Mama told Madeline it was her own fault, she shouldn't have started on him about coming home late when he works hard and deserves time to go get drinks with his friends. After that Madeline feels nothing but a sick, curling disgust where her sympathy should be.

She doesn't like Mama because Mama makes her wear dresses and keep her hair long, even though her skirts tear when she climbs rocks and her hair always flies into her eyes and gets stuck in tree branches. Then Madeline has to come home and listen to Mama scold her about ladylike behaviour and ruining her pretty clothes.

"What does that even mean?" Madeline grumps one afternoon, sitting with her arms folded across her chest, scowling at the mirror. Mama stands behind her, ripping a comb through her hair hard enough to hurt, and muttering to herself under her breath about girls who don't know how to comport themselves. Madeline just grits her teeth and refuses to say ouch when her scalp stings. "What's ladylike? Going out behind the shop with a boy and letting him give you a baby? If that's being a lady I don't think I want to be one."

Mama gasps, and she wrenches the stool around and slaps Madeline right across the face, hard. "Don't you ever say that again!" she spits, and her face is white with two angry red spots on her cheeks. "Don't you dare!"

Madeline just stares at her, the same narrow-eyed, blank look she gives Pa when he's in his rages, and Mama sucks in an angry breath and turns back to the comb.

* * *

Madeline learns not to be messy, not because she likes being tidy - she doesn't, she hates having to pick up her toys and games in the middle of playing and put it away just because Pa decides he doesn't want to look at it - but because there's no telling when Pa will decide he wants everything super clean. One day Madeline leaves her truck on the floor just for a minute while she goes to get a drink of water, and when she gets back, Pa is screaming, picking up everything and throwing it into a bag.

"That's it!" he yells, and Madeline isn't afraid of him but she is, sometimes, afraid of what he'll do and how it will affect her. "Anything on the floor is getting thrown away."

And the thing is, he's not kidding. He shoves Madeline back so she can't get past him to try to shove things back into her chest or onto a shelf in time, and within minutes half her stuff is gone, stuffed into the garbage bag and held over his head so she can't get it no matter how much she tries. Madeline screams right back, beats his leg with her fists and pulls at his shirt until a seam tears, but it's no good. He takes her things out back, builds a fire, and tosses the bag on it. When Madeline tries to run away he grabs her by the arm, twists it until she gasps out in pain, and makes her watch until there's nothing left.

"That's what you get," he says, throwing her back hard enough that she stumbles. "Now go explain to your mother why she has to buy you new clothes tomorrow."

Madeline doesn't tell Mama anything. She wears the same things over and over, washing them in the bathtub late at night when her parents are asleep. Mama never pays attention to her if she's clean, and like always Pa forgets the next day.

It's still not enough; sometimes when Madeline comes home from school Mama screams at her, shoves a cloth into her hands and tells her to dust, faster faster faster, because the house is a mess and Pa works long hours and deserves a nice clean home. There's no getting away; Madeline is stuck in the house until Mama is satisfied, scrubbing and washing and dusting until she can see her face in the sink and the floor squeaks underneath her finger when she rubs it.

Even after all that, there's always something. A pot in the wrong place, a shoe not lined up with the rest, and then Pa spends half an hour shouting at them about how lazy they are, how he should just stop going to work and see how well they'll do without his support. One time he says he should just pick up and leave and see how they like it; Madeline bites the inside of her cheek until she tastes blood to stop herself from saying she thinks she'd like that a lot.

* * *

This time Mama didn't do the dishes fast enough; she'd left them to soak in the sink, meaning to clean them by the time Pa came back, but he left work early and got home before she'd finished and that's her fault because she should have known he wanted to eat dinner at four today. Now he's gone again after threatening to stay away for a week - he won't, sadly, follow through on it - and Madeline squeezes out a tea bag to put on the bruise under Mama's eye.

She doesn't mean to say it, but the anger is too strong, boiling up inside her like the water in the kettle to make the tea, and the words tumble out. "I'm never getting married," Madeline spits out. A clean house is one of the things she's come to understand is a husband's right and a wife's duty. Madeline thinks that if Pa wants a clean house then he should do the cleaning, but that's not the way it works. "If I don't ever get a husband then he can't do things like this."

Mama just shakes her head. "It's not like what you think," she says, pressing her fingertips to the swollen skin above her cheekbone, her face twitching. "The world isn't a nice place, honey, not for women. We're not safe on our own."

Madeline thinks about Mama, young and stupid, believing everything that the boy with the rocks told her, but she keeps her mouth shut. It doesn't sound to her like women are much safer with husbands, either. Not when being married gives the man the right to whatever he wants and the woman to - well, Madeline hasn't figured out to what. Mama says protection, but it's not protection from being shouted at, it's not protection from flying hands.

"I don't care," Madeline says finally. "I won't get married. Not ever."

"You're young," Mama says, and this time her voice goes soft, indulgent, the way people talk to babies, and Madeline's spine stiffens. "You'll change your mind."

"I won't!"

"Well, of course you think so now," Mama says. "But you'll grow up, like all little girls do. All little girls start out thinking like you do, but we get older, and one day you'll see. You'll meet a boy and you'll realize it's not so terrible after all. You'll realize you want it after all."

Fear starts up in Madeline's chest like the low rumble of thunder across the mountains. "What do you mean?"

"It's the way nature made us," Mama says, and she lets her hand fall on Madeline's head, stroking her hair. Madeline is too frozen to tell her to stop it. "When girls are very young, they think boys are smelly, and stupid, and all sorts of things. Then, when they're old enough - when they begin to become young women instead of girls - it changes. Then they start to see boys as something else. They're handsome, and brave, and strong. And when we're old enough, we find the one who's meant for us, and we marry them."

Madeline's hands shake, and she clasps them together to try to stop it. "No," she says, her throat scratchy. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. "No, you can't make me."

"It's nothing to do with making," Mama says. She gives Madeline a smile, one hand still holding the tea bag to her face, her eye squinted shut. "It just happens. When you're old enough you'll see."

Madeline is seven years old. She's terrified to know how old "old enough" is. In her head a giant clock starts ticking.

* * *

The next day at school, Madeline chases down one of the boys in her class just before home time. He's around the same size as her but he's not a bully, and it's easy for Madeline to grab him and shove him up against the wall. "Give me your clothes!" she yells.

The boy stares at her, eyes wide. "What?"

"Give them to me!" Madeline slams him hard enough that his head knocks against the brick. "I need boy's clothes and I don't have any money. Give them to me or I'll punch you until your teeth fall out."

He holds up his hands, cringing away. He looks like he believes her, which is good because Madeline is dead serious. "If you let me go home I'll give you all the clothes you want," he says, sputtering and crying. "I swear. But I don't wanna walk home in my underwear. Please!"

Madeline slits her eyes at him and bares her teeth. "If you're lying you'll pay for it," she says, borrowing one of Pa's phrases, and the boy swallows hard. "I'll come with you. I'll give you two minutes to bring me clothes. If you don't, tomorrow I'll find a rock and I'll beat your head in."

She's never actually beaten anyone up before, but she knows she could. Madeline is big for her age, and strong for a kid, and she has more at stake than whatever makes a boy like that blubber just because someone's threatening him. She just never bothers with that kind of thing because Pa would find out eventually, and it's not worth it just because some kid might have something she wants. Plus, it always seems a little dumb to Madeline to fight kids smaller than you; what does that prove? It makes about as much sense as Pa smacking Mama in the face when she's half his size. Yeah, big man right there.

Madeline follows the boy home, hanging back at the edge of the fence around his house - she picked right, then, nobody has a fence unless they're rich enough to think they have something worth stealing, and probably a kid like that will be able to grab some things without his parents noticing all that much - just in case he ends up telling his parents after all. It's a few tense minutes, Madeline hooking her fingers around the iron bars and trying not to look suspicious, and she's glad that while Pa might not be a craftsman or one of the people in the art guild, they're not quarriers either, which means she doesn't look as out of place as she could.

Finally the boy comes back with a backpack, and he stays on the safe side of the fence and tosses it over at her. "Here," he says, face pale, but he's braver now with something between them. "Now will you leave me alone?"

Madeline isn't stupid, and she opens the bag to make sure he didn't just stuff it full of paper. But no, there's shirts and pants and shorts, and she has to bite her tongue to stop from letting out a sigh of relief. "Good," she says shortly, and slings the bag over her back.

It makes her late coming home, but Mama is busy washing the windows and doesn't notice. "Pick up your room when you go inside," Mama calls, like she always does, as though after Pa went crazy that one time Madeline doesn't keep everything she owns crammed out of sight for fear Pa will look at it and decide she doesn't deserve to have it.

"Yeah, I will," Madeline yells back, and sneaks into the kitchen for a pair of scissors. She's good at sneaking, otherwise she'd be a lot hungrier on days when Pa decides she's mouthy and deserves to go to bed without dinner.

Madeline shuts the door to her room - there's no lock, at least not on the inside, so she jams it with a textbook from school where the wooden doorframe warped from the heat - and pulls out all her clothes. Every skirt, every dress, every shirt with ruffles on the sleeves or collar, every pair of tights she hasn't already destroyed by snagging them on rocks or tree branches, she yanks out of her dresser and puts onto a pile in the middle of the floor. She almost does the underwear, too, but nobody's going to see that and she didn't think to make the boy give her any, so she leaves one drawer of those.

She's shaking by the time she finishes. She wants to cut them all up into tiny pieces with the scissors, but there's no time for that, not when Mama might finish with the windows and come in to check on Madeline's room before she's done. She has to make sure there's nothing left, nothing they could put back together; she can already see Pa throwing her in front of a table and giving her a needle and thread and refusing to let her move until she's pieced everything the way it was.

Madeline only leaves one dress in her closet, and that's the plain blue one she wears to the Reaping. That's too serious for even her to mess with, no matter how mad she is, but she shoves it at the very back and hides it behind other things so only she will know where it is. That done, Madeline peels off her school dress and pulls on a pair of pants and a short-sleeved shirt from the bag the boy gave her.

It feels like climbing a big tree when the breeze is high, leaning forward on a large branch until she's balanced on her stomach with her arms keeping her steady. It feels like she thinks flying might feel. It feels like the dreams she has where she comes home from school and the house burnt down and Pa and Mama are dead. Madeline blows out her breath in a quick whoosh and swipes at her eyes with her hands.

There's a laundry basket in the corner, and Madeline shoves everything into it, cramming it down with her feet until it's nearly bursting, and she drags it outside. The basket thumps against the floor with every step, and she holds her breath the whole time. But finally she's safe in the yard, out at the burnt patch of rock and scrub-grass that Pa uses to get rid of trash, and she piles the whole thing on it and sets it on fire.

The ash-smell of the burning cloth sticks in her nose and makes her cough, but Madeline stays where she is, only shifting a little to avoid the worst of the smoke when it blows into her face. She squints against the brightness of the flames, watching as one dress she hated more than anything else blackens and curls, the lace turning brown for a split second before disappearing in a flash of fire. It takes less time for all the clothes to burn up than Madeline thought it would, and soon there's nothing left.

Mama will notice soon - it's lucky she's cleaning the other side of the house - and that doesn't leave Madeline much time. Once the last of the clothes turn to black lumps, she takes the scissors out of her pocket and hacks at her hair, tossing blonde handfuls onto the last of the fire. It takes her a few tries - she's got a lot of hair, and Mama never let her cut it before - and by the end her arm cramps from holding it behind her but finally she's done, her hair chopped short and close to her scalp.

Burnt hair, it turns out, smells way worse than clothes, and it stings the inside of Madeline's nostrils and makes her eyes water even worse. She throws handfuls of dirt onto the low flames, kicks the remains loose, and stomps on everything with her shoes until the coals break apart and turn to smoke and dust.

Madeline twists her fingers in her hair - so short now, shorter than she ever remembers it being - and swallows as her heart rate kicks up. She's in for it now.

Her luck holds out until she sneaks in the back door and turns the corner, where Madeline runs right into Mama, who takes one look at her and shrieks, clapping both hands over her mouth. "What did you do?" Mama shouts, and she goes to grab Madeline by the arm but changes her mind halfway through, recoiling like she thinks she's going to get a disease. "Your hair - your clothes!"

"I don't want to get married," Madeline says, and sticks out her chin. "If I look like this, no one will want to marry me."

Mama gapes at her, all the colour gone from her face. "Oh, baby girl, no," she says, her mouth hanging open. "Oh. Okay. Okay. We can fix this. Give me the scissors and I'll try to make your hair look cute. We can tell your father you were getting a rash from the heat, that's all, and I thought it would be best to cut it. Go upstairs and put your clothes back on."

"I can't," Madeline says, and this is it. There's no turning back. "I burned them all. There's only boy things left. And if you go out and buy me a dress I'll burn that, too. I'm not wearing girl clothes anymore."

She expects Mama to shout some more, to turn red and angry and start slamming cupboard doors the way she only does when they're alone and Pa isn't around to hear, but she doesn't. Mama just goes whiter and quieter and more and more frozen until she looks like a statue, and Madeline doesn't like this. She knows how to deal with Mama mad; she has no idea what to do with this.

"Oh, baby girl," Mama says again, finally. She stumbles back, hand groping at the air, until she finds the wall, and she leans against it with her back pressed to the wood. She sucks in a wet breath, and her eyes are wide and shining. "You have no idea what you just did. Do you know what he's going to _do_ to you?"

Madeline doesn't like this at all. "I don't care," she says, but her voice lilts up at the end instead of staying firm without her meaning it to. She wants to kick herself.

"Maybe you don't, but I do," Mama says, and her mouth goes tight. "All right, go upstairs. Go to your room, close the door, and don't come out until someone gets you. I'll try to talk to him and get him warned before he sees you." She leans down and grips Madeline by the shoulders. "Don't be cute and come downstairs, do you hear me? Stay in your room."

Madeline wants to say something smart just to see Mama get cross with her and have everything go back to normal, but she just nods. She runs to her room, slams the door, and wishes that her math textbook really would keep people out. Her stomach turns over and a sick taste crawls into her throat like she swallowed a frog.

It's done, Madeline reminds herself. There's nothing he can do about it. If he wants to make her grow her hair back he can try, but he can't watch her forever. He can't keep her away from scissors forever. And the thing with Pa is, eventually he gets tired of yelling; eventually he throws up his arms and tells her she's hopeless and he leaves her alone. If she's lucky this will be a quick burn, up like an explosion and out just as fast.

Madeline's legs shake. She sits on her bed and pulls her knees to her chest to try to make them stop.

She has homework, but a few minutes of sitting at her desk, staring at the page and seeing none of it, and Madeline gives up on that. She tries reading, she tries flipping through the photo book of scenic Panem that she stole from the school library a few years ago, she tries lying down with her pillow over her head hoping the darkness will put her to sleep. Nothing works. It's stupid, but Mama's nervous energy has infected her, and she can't sit still or concentrate on anything. The room fills up with nerves until she's sure she can smell it, and Madeline keeps running her fingers through her hair to make sure it hasn't grown back in the last few minutes.

Finally Pa comes home; the front door slams, and the low buzz of conversation makes it up the stairs, though none of the words pass through Madeline's door. Not until Pa shouts "_What_?" at the top of his voice, and then comes Mama again, high and panicked, trying to soothe him, but it's no good. His footsteps bang up the stairs, and Madeline jumps off her bed and stands in the middle of the room, where she feels safest. At the last minute she runs to the window and heaves up the sash, just in case she has to jump. She's fallen out of a tree this high and only broke her arm. It probably won't kill her.

The door flies open, and Pa fills the doorway, face contorted. Madeline refuses to be afraid, which means the twisting in her gut and cold sweat trickles between her shoulder blades must be something else. She twists her fingers in the hem of the boy's shirt - her shirt, now - and lets the rough, non-girly fabric give her strength.

"So your mother wasn't lying," Pa says, low and dangerous. "You really went and did this to yourself. You have five seconds to give me a good reason before I tan your hide."

He actually counts, big and dramatic and drawing out the final sound of each number. There's nothing Madeline can say that will convince him. She keeps her mouth shut, gritting her teeth hard just in case she panics and something tries to slip out.

"I see," Pa says. "So you wanna be a boy, is that it? You want to be a boy so bad you'll disgrace your mother and me, run around looking like some guttersnipe, well, I see. Well guess what, little girl, you want to be a boy, I'll treat you like a boy!"

Madeline has two seconds to wonder what that means as Pa rounds on her, before his arm lashes out and the back of his hand catches her full across the face.

Pa has spanked her before, and his use of rulers on her palms has left them dulled to pain, but this is different. It sparks through her whole face; there's fire in the bridge of her nose, and soon the blood flows, hot and thick and wet. Madeline cries out before she can stop herself, and she holds her forearm under her nose, snuffling and trying to pull it all back. Pa glares down at her, fist clenched, his knuckles and wedding ring stained red.

"You think it's that easy, you've got another thing coming," Pa says. He grabs her arm, wrenches it hard, and holds her at arm's length while she struggles, scrabbling at his wrist with her fingers until her nails tear at his skin. He holds her as he pulls open the buckle on his belt and slides it free, the leather rasping against his belt loops.

Madeline has never heard a sound so terrifying. She twists free and breaks for the window, but Pa lunges and the end of the belt catches her on the backs of her legs. Madeline stumbles, and that's all he needs to catch her.

"This ends when you cry," Pa tells her, his voice flat and hard with anger, as the belt strikes her skin again, again, again.

She'd been about to - nothing has ever hurt this much - but that stops her. Madeline clamps her mouth tight shut, choking on the drying blood as she forces herself to breathe through her nose. She counts as high as she can go. She tries to name all the mayors of District Two since the last Quarter Quell. She thinks of every nursery rhyme the teachers used to sing to them when she was little.

Finally Pa stops - his arm must be tired, the last while he hasn't been hitting as hard - and he shoves her away from him. "Next time," he growls, "I use the buckle end. You have no idea what you've got yourself into, little girl."

Madeline waits until his footfalls fade down the stairs before she lets herself cry, bitter and furious and silent. She twists around, trying to see her back, but she can't make it out well enough to tell if there are marks. Her calves are scored with raised pink welts, but Madeline thinks they'll fade soon enough. The worst isn't just how it hurts but the deep, gnawing sense of helplessness inside her, twisting until she feels just as sick from that as she does from the humiliation and pain.

Finally she gets herself under control, but when Madeline tries to push open the door, it sticks in the frame and the handle won't turn. Madeline glares over her shoulder at the window, but she doesn't want to risk it. Not yet. He'll let her out tomorrow morning and she can wash her face before school. He won't want her going with dried blood crusted all over her lower face, that'd shame him just as much as her clothes.

Madeline pulls herself upright, ignoring the twinges all over her, and stares at herself in the mirror. The kid who stares back is angry, scary, and not at all pretty. Not someone who will grow up into a pretty girl and get lots of boys wanting to marry her. The Madeline in the mirror looks like she might pull a knife out of nowhere and stick it in your gut before she'll let you touch her, and that's good enough.

She doesn't get to eat supper that night, but it doesn't matter. Victory sits in her stomach just as heavy as any meal.

* * *

"Madeline!" her teacher gasps. "What happened?" She lowers her voice, starts to lay a hand on Madeline's shoulder but pulls back. "Did someone hurt you?"

For a moment, Madeline pictures telling the teacher about Pa. She imagines the Peacekeepers showing up at the house, clapping cuffs on his wrists and dragging him away. It's a glorious image for all of three seconds, but after that it sours. Mama doesn't have any skills - Pa always reminds them they'd both be nowhere without him, and Madeline would get more mad at that except she's never seen Mama do anything useful ever - and Madeline's not old enough to do anything even if she did. If they take Pa away they'll take Madeline away and put her in a home, and she might hate Mama but not enough to give up her house and her room and her life just yet.

Madeline looks up at Mrs. Sullivan and shakes her head. "I was playing on the rock pile and I fell," she says. The cut on her lip stretches when she smiles. "I won't do that again."

Mrs. Sullivan gives Madeline a long look, giving her time to change her mind, then sighs. "Be careful next time," she says. "And if you get hurt again, you can tell me."

The other kids whisper, but one glare from Madeline sets them quiet. Nobody talks to her at all until lunch - she doesn't have one, not today, who knows how long Pa will keep food away as a punishment - when the boy whose clothes she stole sits down next to her on the bench.

"You're not wearing a dress today," he says, tentative.

"Nope," Madeline says, not looking at him.

Pause. After a minute he says, "You want my hat? It'd hide your face."

Madeline says noting, just stares out over the playground at the flocks of kids laughing and running around and trading each other bits of their lunches. The boy gets up, comes back a few minutes later with a cap that he holds out to her. Madeline snatches it out of his hand and jams it down hard on her head, pulling the brim down low over her eyes. He's right, it will cover the worst of her face, at least her bruised and swollen nose, and she grunts.

"Good luck," the boy says, but he leaves before Madeline can tip her head up and scowl at him.

That night after school, Madeline takes the long way home around the abandoned quarry, skirting the empty scar in the earth until she makes it back to her house. Pa is waiting for her when she gets there - he'll have left work early - and she tenses when she walks up, ready for him to make good on his promise.

"You want to be a boy, I'm gonna treat you like a boy," Pa says to Madeline when she stops in front of him, scuffing her shoes in the dirt. She can't see his face past the brim of her hat, but his voice doesn't sound like he's going to hit her. He's angry still but it's pulled back, the way Mama's got when Madeline came home with the back of her skirt torn because she chased a boy over the fence. "Come down to the shop with me. You're gonna start working the stone after school. No more games, no more playing, you hear me? If I had a son I'd start training him now. Guess that means you."

Madeline doesn't say anything, but she drops her bag on the floor and doesn't take off her shoes. Pa grunts and heads out the door.

When they get back, Madeline starts for her room. "Where you think you're going?" Pa demands. "Go wash up and help your mother set the table for supper."

* * *

Two days later, the Centre sends people to Madeline's school. Madeline chafes at sitting in assemblies but this time she doesn't move, just sits still and rapt while the tall, strong, beautiful people tell them about District Two's Athletics and Personal Growth Centre, a place where kids can go in the afternoon and get rewarded for being strong and fast and smart.

Madeline isn't stupid. She knows what the Hunger Games are. They haven't had the talk yet, not officially - she's heard that happens in school when kids are ten, and some parents do it earlier but hers haven't - but she knows what it is because one boy in his class, his parents made him watch last year and told him if he didn't behave they were going to send him there when he grew up. That's where bad kids go, his parents told him, except when he told the teacher the Peacekeepers came and took his parents away and now he lives in a Peacehome.

The Hunger Games is a TV program where kids get together and kill each other, and the Centre is the one who trains them to get there. Except that Madeline is also smart, and she can do math, and only two kids each year actually go into the Games. The Centre takes a lot more kids than that every year, and a lot of them come back early. There are big kids in the older grades, strong confident kids, who did the Program for a few years, and they come back just fine.

You learn how to fight if you stay long enough. Madeline curls her hands into fists, thinks of Pa and her door that doesn't lock.

After the assembly they're given free time, either to go back to their classrooms or up to the front to ask questions. She elbows other kids out of the way - it's everyone in her grade and the one above, all kids seven and eight years old - and shuffles to the front, trying to look strong and brave like the kids in the pictures.

She's not pretty, that's the only thing - the kids on the brochures look like they came out of a Capitol magazine, perfect teeth and hair and everything - but maybe that wouldn't matter. Pretty doesn't help you fight, right?

The woman at the table looks down at Madeline, and something in her eyes flickers as she looks her up and down. Madeline wants to shuffle - she knows what she must look like, wearing stolen boy's clothes with her hair hacked to pieces and her face all bashed up - but instead she straightens, pulling her shoulders back and raising her chin up.

"What do I have to do to get in?" Madeline asks. A boy tries to brush past her, takes one look at her face, and skitters away.

"First you need one of your parents or guardians to sign this form and bring it back," the woman says. She talks in a clear, professional voice, no 'sweetie' or 'honey', no sugar in her voice, and something inside Madeline aches out of need to hear that more. It's like they actually think she's a person, not a little doll that will soon disappoint them because she's not fun to play with. "We'll be here all week, so take your time."

Madeline takes the paper, and she actually folds it up before putting it in her pocket instead of crumpling it into a ball and stuffing it somewhere she'll forget in five minutes, like she does with her warning letters from teachers. "Then what?"

"Once the paperwork goes through, we'll send your school a letter with a map to the closest Centre testing facility," the lady says. She has gold thread woven into her black hair, and Madeline hates pretty things but on her it's almost mesmerizing, catching the light as she moves her head. "You can come to the one on the map or any of the others and have a talk with some of our people. If you pass, we'll let you know and you can start coming to the Centre once your parents sign the papers."

Madeline winces. That's a lot of parental permission for something that she's pretty sure her parents would hate. "I don't know if they'll let me," she says. "Can I do it anyway?"

The woman gives Madeline a long, thoughtful kind of look, then she reaches behind the table and gives her another pamphlet. "Give them this," she says. "This is about the stipend. It might help."

Madeline doesn't know what 'stipend' means, but she flips through the pages and sees information about money and food stamps and things. She narrows her eyes. "You'd pay my parents to take me?"

"Compensate," the woman corrects her, which just sounds like a nicer word for it, but grownups like to do that and they get upset if someone calls them on it. "Some parents hesitate about letting their kids go somewhere strange for a few hours a day, so this makes it easier."

Madeline chews on the inside of her lip, then nods and puts the pamphlet in her pocket, too. "Okay," she says. She looks up at the lady, and she's pretty in a way Madeline will never be but she's also hard, the line of muscles visible in her arms, and she carries herself in a way Madeline would love to learn how to do. Like nobody can mess with her and she knows it. It's how Madeline wishes she felt all the time, not just those few minutes before something proves her wrong.

"One thing," Madeline says. "Will you make me wear dresses?"

This time the lady smiles. "All the kids at the Centre wear uniforms," she says. "No skirts. How are you supposed to climb ropes in a dress?"

Madeline is glad she put the papers away, because the rattling as her hands shook would give away just how hard the relief slams into her. "Okay," she says again. She touches her fist to her chest. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"I'll look forward to it."

* * *

"Sign this," Madeline says to Mama when she gets home, before she heads over to Pa's shop to start working. She slides the permission form across the table. "It's a thing for school. Medical stuff."

Mama takes the pen from Madeline and signs on the lines where Madeline shows her, not paying attention to the writing at all, just like Madeline thought she wouldn't. She hands the paper back, and Madeline quickly folds it up and slides it into her pocket before Mama can change her mind and decide she wants to see it again.

"Wait," Mama says when Madeline turns, and for a second Madeline's heart kicks into overdrive. "I'm glad you're putting effort into getting along with your father," she says. Madeline's first reaction is to stifle an explosive sigh of relief; her second is to hold her face steady so she doesn't raise her eyebrow. Is that what she's doing. "He's a good man. We just have to learn to know what he wants and anticipate that, and then everything's fine."

"I'm trying," Madeline says, because she has no idea how to answer that. Mama smiles.

* * *

She slaps the permission form down on the table in a triumphant gesture. The same lady from yesterday is back today, and she gives Madeline a small smile as she puts the form into a file. Madeline smiles back, the expression strange on her face. It's been a long time.

"How's your breathing?" the lady asks. Madeline frowns, then the woman touches the bridge of her nose and Madeline gets it. "Do you feel stuffy? Any trouble getting air in through your nose?"

"At first," Madeline says cautiously. It's still purple and the bruising has spread to below her eyes, but she doesn't actually notice anymore unless she tries to touch it. "Not now, though."

"Good," the woman says with a nod. "Means it's not broken." She tilts her head. "Put lots of pillows under your head when you sleep, that'll help the swelling go down faster. If you want you can soak a washcloth in warm water and keep it on your face for about twenty minutes, that'll help too."

Madeline's eyes go wide. "Will I learn that sort of stuff if I go?" she asks.

"The Centre has the best medical facilities in the district, so you won't need to," the lady says. "But you tend to pick up on things."

Even better. The sooner the bruises fade, the faster Pa will forget he was mad. Madeline glances over her shoulder, but all the teachers are at the far side of the room, like they're intimidated by the Centre people - afraid, even. She leans in. "You only talked about stuff like sports and running and athletic things, but I'll learn how to fight, right? If I stay long enough."

The woman looks at her, her eyes narrowing a fraction like she's trying to decide whether to say something. Madeline's hands tighten on the tabletop. "I want to learn to fight," she says, trying to hold the desperation back, but she can't, not entirely. "I need to."

Finally the woman gives Madeline a private sort of look, the corner of her mouth tilting up. "I think you'll be a natural," she says.

Madeline lets her breath out in a whoosh. "Good," she says. "I'll see you at the testing place, then."

* * *

Over a week passes without anything happening, and Madeline nearly goes crazy from the wait. She pays attention to lessons in school - really pays attention, like the kids who sit at the front and think that if they're smart that will somehow help them get out of here - just because it gives her something else to think about, and after school she goes to work with Pa cutting the rocks down into cubes and after that she eats and after that she makes herself sleep just so it all goes away.

She dreams about the Centre. In her dreams it's a big white building, huge and shiny, and everyone inside is beautiful but sharp around the edges and there are no dresses anywhere and nobody tells Madeline she's not behaving like a good little girl.

The one thing she learns is that she hates rocks. A lot. Rocks are stupid and boring, and maybe in nature they're pretty or something - Madeline likes the mountains, tall and strong and distant - but when she has to sit in the heat and do nothing but carve and pound slabs of limestone and granite and marble into blocks it gets boring really fast.

This isn't a life. It's not a future. Pa is proud of it - he scoffs at the artisans, the people closer into town that take the blocks he carves and put birds or trees and stuff in them before selling them to furniture makers - and he tells Madeline that one day if she doesn't screw up she could take over the shop.

"It's good honest living," Pa tells her. "No putting on airs like your granddaddy -" he turns and spits, and Madeline used to but now she just rolls her eyes inside her head. The older she gets the more she thinks her granddaddy is probably pretty sane if he was mad at Pa for what he did to Mama. "Just us and the rocks and our tools, making useful things for people to use. Nothing better than that."

Madeline can think of a lot better. So much lots better, and most of it sits in a giant building located at the base of the mountains up north and to the west. She doesn't say anything, just grunts - Pa likes that better anyway, less girly chatter - and drives the chisel into the fissure again.

* * *

The letter comes ten days in. Mrs. Sullivan hands it to Madeline at the end of the day. Madeline tears it open while the other kids stream through - nobody else in her class has a letter, they all filter out of the room without looking at her - and sees the words ACCEPTED FOR INTERVIEW in big block letters at the top of the page.

Madeline's stomach turns into frogs and she skims the rest of the paper. It has a lot of fancy words, and Madeline is smart but she's never seen most of these before. "Do you want me to read it for you?" Mrs. Sullivan asks. Normally Madeline would say no and tell her to mind her own business, but this is important and she needs to know, so she hands the paper over.

Mrs. Sullivan's eyes flicker over the page. "It says the closest testing facility is in Columbia," she says, and Madeline swallows. There's no train station there. "The next one on the train line is in Burbank."

That's almost an hour away, and Madeline sucks in a breath. No way could she make it there in time. Mrs. Sullivan glances at her, and her face does that think again - tight around the eyes, her mouth pinching - that means she's thinking about Madeline's Pa and how much she wishes she could say something. "I could drive you."

"You have a car?" Madeline blurts out without thinking, impressed in spite of herself.

"It's very old," Mrs. Sullivan says with a smile. "It's been in my family a long time. We won't be able to go very fast, but I should be able to get you there easily enough."

Madeline hesitates. Grownups don't just give kids things, she's learned that well enough. "Why?" she asks, leaning back and angling herself away.

Mrs. Sullivan bites her lip. "Because you should have the chance to do something more with your life," she says, and Madeline's eyes pop. "The Centre is a place of opportunity. A few years there will change your life."

Just like the time Pa got a new TV for the house and suddenly all the colours on the screen looked that much brighter - she never knew the field at the beginning of the mandatory Capitol broadcasts had blue flowers in it until then - Madeline looks at Mrs. Sullivan like the whole world just changed. She looks the same, she sounds the same, but now her words dig a fishhook into Madeline's chest and pull.

And so, Madeline admits what she couldn't to the woman from the Centre in case they changed their minds. "I don't know if Pa will let me go. Once they take me and I can give him the stuff about the stipend I think it'll be okay, but." She clenches her hands. "He likes to say no to stuff."

Mrs. Sullivan wets her lips for a minute, her gaze sliding to the door before she answers. "I can give you a note that says there's an after-school assembly tomorrow. We can go when class finishes."

Madeline doesn't say thank you often - Pa says if you say thanks for everything then the world will think it doesn't owe you anything, and she doesn't agree with him much but she does think he's right on that one - but she comes close to it now. She can't keep it from her face, anyway, and she nearly snatches the note out of Mrs. Sullivan's hands when she finishes.

"See you tomorrow," Madeline says, and darts out the door.

* * *

"All these assemblies." Pa rolls his eyes and hands the note back. "You'd think they realized kids have better things to do."

"I tried to get out of it," Madeline says, lying casually.

"I believe it," Pa says, shaking his head. "Well, whatever. Come home as soon as they let you out."

It's hard not to grin for the rest of the night. Madeline keeps poking her nose to make herself grimace instead and even then she still almost gets caught.

* * *

The Centre testing facility is a square grey building that, really, doesn't look all that exciting. Madeline would be disappointed except she's almost vibrating in her seat, her stomach churning with nerves and from being in a car for the first time. She takes the train every year to the nearest Reaping point so she's used to that, but the rollicking motion of the cars over the tracks is nothing like the rumbling, bouncing mess that is riding in a car over rough, rocky roads.

By the time they get there she's a little green, and she hopes they won't make her try to spin around in circles or anything right away.

Turns out they don't make her do anything right away. They take her inside and sit her down in a big room with grey walls, and a lady sits down across from her at a wooden table. "It's nice to meet you, Madeline," she says. "My name's Blair. You'll be talking with me today."

Madeline's feet don't touch the floor, and she hooks her feet around the chair legs so she doesn't swing them. It seems like a baby thing to do, and it doesn't look like the Centre wants babies. "Hi," she says, but they do want people who look good on camera, so she sits up straight. "I'm honoured to be here," she says, trying to sound poised and confident like the woman who came to the school.

'Honoured' seems like a good way of putting it. The Centre brochure talked a lot about that.

"I'm glad," Blair says. "Let's start out slow, I know you had a long drive and my legs are always shaky after." She takes out a book and slides it across the table. "Here, why don't you look at these and tell me if you can see the pattern?"

The patterns are easy to find, either in the different-shaped blocks or the strings of numbers and letters, and after that they move on. There's some math, some reading, and some questions where Madeline has to answer what she thinks the person in the picture is thinking. That's hard at first, but then she pretends she's the person and it gets easier after that.

The lady makes marks on her paper sometimes. Madeline doesn't pay attention to that too much - of course they will, this is a test, even if they try to pretend it's just a conversation, Madeline isn't three and everything with grownups is a test anyway - except once, when she looks at a picture of a boy looking out the window.

"He's thinking he wants to get away," Madeline says. "He's thinking nobody understands and if he just found somebody who understands maybe it wouldn't be so bad."

"Do his parents understand?" Blair asks.

Madeline scoffs. "What? No. His parents are stupid. They don't know anything."

And then whoa, that's a lot of writing, and Madeline sits up straight, scowling. "Hey!" she snaps before she can stop herself. "I'm not talking about _my_ parents! Is that what this is?"

Blair stops writing and looks up, surprised, but then her expression turns impressed, a small smile and eyes that focus on Madeline and not the paper. "Is that what you think I'm doing?"

"Well, aren't you?" Madeline doesn't like being tricked. She doesn't like being lied to.

Blair smiles like a knife. "Well, do your parents understand?"

Madeline's mouth snaps shut, and her shoulders slump. "No," she mumbles. "But if you wanna know, just ask me."

Blair laughs and slides the papers away. "Okay. Let's just talk, then. Tell me about your parents."

They talk about her parents and if she gets into fights and what makes her mad, and what she would do if other kids didn't do what she wanted them to do or didn't listen. They talk about what she does when she's angry. They talk about why she's here. It's a lot of talking, and by the end Madeline almost wishes she'd let Blair do it secretly with pictures because she's all twitchy and angry and needs to get some energy out.

"Why don't we go outside and you can show me how you can run and climb," Blair says, and Madeline nods because yes please. "I just have to do some paperwork first so I'll need you to sit here, but here." She walks to a cupboard, takes out a plate and a bag of puffy white things. "This is a marshmallow," Blair says. "It's like a dessert. You can have one now, or if you wait until I get back you can have two."

She puts it on a plate and sets it in front of Madeline, who narrows her eyes. "How long?" she asks.

"I'm not sure how long it will take, but not too long," Blair says, and she raises an eyebrow. "If you're trying to decide whether I want you to eat it or wait, you don't have to. It's entirely up to you."

Madeline drums her fingers against the tabletop. It's another test, but she can't decide what it is. Still, she doesn't like sitting - she can, she's not like the boys in class who complain about having to be good during tests or anything, she's not _five_ - but she will if she has to. But this is the Centre. They may as well make it worth her while.

"If I wait longer can I have three?" she asks, and Blair tries to hide a grin but doesn't quite make it. "If you were going to be gone for five minutes, can I have another one if you leave for eight?"

Blair makes a note. "Why don't you wait and we'll see."

In the end, Madeline gets her three marshmallows after all, but it turns out she doesn't actually like the taste of them. They're too sweet and chalky, and they make her mouth feel funny. Blair takes her out past a line of kids waiting for their turns, and Madeline darts out and snags a boy by the sleeve. "Whatcha give me if I give you these?" she asks.

The boy tilts his head and studies the final two marshmallows. He's skinny, even though he's built big, large bones but not enough to cover them, and she recognizes the hunger in his eyes. "I'll let you hit me," he says. "Don't got nothin' else."

Madeline still has bugs under her skin from talking too much about Pa and what he does to Mama and how Mama just lets him because he's her husband and she has to, and so she grins. "Deal," she says. She runs back to Blair minus the marshmallows and with stinging knuckles; the boy has a bruise on his cheek, snacks in his hand and a smile on his face.

"Feel better?" Blair asks her.

"Yeah." Madeline runs a hand through her hair. Short, short, short like freedom. "Do you have a rock wall? I'm good at climbing rocks."

"Sure," Blair says, and turns a corner. "It's over past the dodgeball court."

By the end of the day, Madeline needs to go home now because she's going to start doing something embarrassing like gush all over the place. The Centre is full of kids like her, big and mean and tough, and there are walls to scale and ropes to climb and balls to throw at each other, and the food is better than she's ever tasted and all she has to do is be _good at stuff_. And not stupid stuff like sitting still with her ankles crossed and letting Mama brush her hair, but stuff that matters, stuff like beating all the boys in a race and knowing the best ways to punch without hurting her hand and being the only one brave enough to cross the ropes course on the ceiling.

They give Madeline a whole piece of cake to herself, and they don't even tell her she shouldn't finish it because that's not ladylike. She eats it with her fingers and Blair doesn't say a word.

If they don't accept her, Madeline thinks she might die.

Madeline is not a baby. She hasn't been a baby for a long time. And yet when Blair tells her it's time to go, they'll let her school know if she's been accepted, Madeline has to stop herself from throwing her arms around Blair's waist and begging her to let her stay. The impulse shocks Madeline right down to her core, freezing her to the spot long enough that Blair can smile at her and walk away.

Madeline hasn't cried in a long time either, but now something chokes in her throat. If they asked her to burn her house down in exchange for being able to come here tomorrow she's not sure she wouldn't.

"Let's get you back," Mrs. Sullivan says, coming up beside Madeline, her hand near her shoulder but not touching. Mrs. Sullivan never touches Madeline without permission, not without making sure Madeline can see her. Some of the others do; Madeline once got sent to the headmaster for punching one of the male teachers who put his hand on her shoulder from behind. "Did you have fun?"

Madeline can't say anything. She doesn't trust herself. She just nods, and twists around in her seat to watch the Centre building get smaller and smaller in the tiny back window until it disappears.

* * *

She's excited enough, impatient enough, that she talks back to Pa three days in a row. The third time he grabs her by the arm, yanks it behind her back, and tells her he'll let go when she says she'll shut her mouth.

Later she couldn't tell anyone why she did it. Maybe it's the thought of the rope beneath her hands as she climbed to the ceiling, or the warm, moist cake they gave her, or the boy grinning at her after she hit him in the face and gave him the marshmallows.

Madeline doesn't apologize. All she means to say is 'no', which is bad enough, but what comes out is 'fuck you'.

For years after, Madeline can't hear someone bite through a stalk of celery without wincing.

* * *

The doctor sets down his clipboard and looks up at Pa. Pa's hand is hard on Madeline's shoulder, his fingers digging into the bone. "If you'd wait outside for a minute, I'd just like to talk to Madeline about some exercises she can do to make sure her shoulder doesn't freeze. It won't take long."

"No sir," says Pa, like a thundercloud, like a rockslide. "Anything you can say to my daughter you can say to me."

It's a spiral fracture, the doctor said earlier, fixing Madeline with a long, level look. Caused by pulling and twisting. He'd asked her how she got it.

"I fell out of a tree," Madeline told him, the marks from Pa's fingers still imprinted as bruises upon her skin. "My arm got stuck."

Now, the doctor lets out a long breath. "All right." He takes out a piece of paper covered in drawings of people doing a bunch of different stretches. "You'll want to do shoulder rolls when you wake up in the morning -"

Once the doctor finishes, Pa gives him a broad smile that hides a million beatings behind it. "See?" he says, his voice as friendly as a bear. "No need to send me out, and now I can help her remember when she forgets. She forgets a lot," he adds, ruffling Madeline's hair. Madeline doesn't pull away, but she sneers before she can stop herself.

* * *

Mrs. Sullivan pulls Madeline outside of class again. "Madeline," she says, and her voice is tight and stretched like a rubber band pulled almost to the snapping point. "Madeline, you have to let me tell someone."

Madeline shifts back, biting back the wince as the movement jars her arm. She's not used to the sling, and the cast itches against her skin. "Nothing to tell," she says. The words rasp like a dull file across the jagged edge of a marble block, destroying the grain of the stone.

Mrs. Sullivan's face collapses into a frown, and her eyes flicker like she's trying to think of something, anything to say. "What are you going to do if the Centre takes you but you have to climb a rope first thing?" she asks finally. Madeline jerks upright, suddenly terrified. "If you can't tell me, tell the Centre," Mrs. Sullivan insists. "They'll teach you how to fight back."

Madeline flinches. "They'll think I'm weak."

Mrs. Sullivan's jaw clenches hard enough it sticks out. "No," she says, her voice dark. "They won't."

* * *

The letter comes a few days later. Mrs. Sullivan offers to open it and read it first, but Madeline snatches it out of her hand. It's hard to open - she braces it against her chest with her cast and tears at the envelope with her good fingers - but finally Madeline fishes out the paper inside and flicks it open. She scans the words until she finds the one she wants: ACCEPTED.

Madeline shrieks and pumps the letter in the air. "I got in!" she yells. She waves the letter in Mrs. Sullivan's face. "They let me in, I got in!"

"Of course you did," Mrs. Sullivan says. "I never doubted you would. You're everything they want."

Madeline stops then, thinking of the beautiful, striking Volunteers who stand on the stage every year. "I'm not pretty, though."

This time Mrs. Sullivan narrows her eyes. "Look at that letter again," she says. "Does it look like they care? Lots of little girls are pretty but none of them are like you. That's what they want."

Madeline presses the paper to her chest again, like if she holds it tight enough it will absorb into her and go into her blood and the ink will twist itself round through her veins, like a secret, invisible tattoo only she can read. A tattoo that tells her she's good enough, that the person she wants to be isn't a bad thing after all.

She waits until she and Pa come home from the shop - Madeline can only use one hand, but the blocks are big enough it doesn't matter - to tell them. After supper she pulls the paper out of her pocket and slaps it down on the table. "Here," she says. "I joined the Program."

Mama sucks in her breath and leans back in her chair so fast it tips backward on two legs. Pa just stares at her. "What?" he says. He's using his dangerous voice, the one that means 'say that again I dare you', but what is she going to tell the doctor this time, that she fell out of a tree _again_? The sense of power floods her in a dizzying rush, and Madeline grips the edge of the tabletop in an attempt to ground herself.

"They came to the school and tested us," Madeline lies without even blinking. "I got a letter today saying they want me. I guess I'm strong and stuff." She squares her shoulders. "I'm going."

"Like hell you're going!" Pa bursts out. "You think I'm stupid enough to believe they just came to your school and tested you and that's it? You're lying to me."

Madeline knows what lying means, and she knows the punishment for it. Her arms ache already, but she doesn't move, just keeps the paper with its Centre letterhead in the corner of her eye and lets it give her strength. "It doesn't matter how it happened. They want me." Pa's face turns purple, and that's when she remembers the lady at the information drive. "They're going to pay you."

Pa stops. He lets out a breath, and all the angry colour drains away like someone poked a hole in him. "What are we talking here?" he asks.

"Hank!" Mama explodes, whirling on him. "You're going to let them take her for _money_?"

"Well, you heard her, it's the Centre!" Pa snaps. "You want to walk in there and tell them no, because I don't! At least we can get something out of it."

Madeline pulls the crumpled papers with the stipend information and slides it over. Pa picks it up and leafs through the pages, eyes narrowed. He didn't finish school - no need, he got himself his own business at sixteen and that's done him just fine - and so sometimes the harder words make him mad, but he gets the gist of it soon enough. "Huh," he says, setting down the pamphlet, and he gives Madeline the kind of sharp-edged look he usually gives a slab of marble before he decides where to start cutting. "Well, that's something."

"It's in the afternoon," Madeline says. She knows an advantage when she sees one, no matter how white-faced and horrified Mama looks, sitting there with her hands twisted in her skirt. "I would go to school in the morning, take the train to the Centre in the afternoon, and be back to help out at the shop before dinner. You said girls don't need an education anyway, and even a real man's better off to learn a trade."

"That's true," Pa says absently. He's looking over the figures again. "All right, well, looks like we don't have a choice, but they're making it up to us, at least."

"You can't be serious." Mama never stands up to Pa like this; Madeline would be impressed except go figure it's the one time she doesn't need it. Her arm itches again. "We're not talking about an after-school sports team, you know what the Centre is. What kind of monster will we get back?"

If Madeline plays right, they won't get her back at all, but she knows better than to open her mouth. Sure enough, Pa flicks his gaze her way. "Madeline, go outside. Don't come back in until I go get you."

Madeline keeps it together until the door shuts and the voice behind it burst out like someone fired a gun, and then she runs. She runs all the way to the bluffs out past the house, where she picks up a big, thick stick almost the width of her wrist and wields it like a sword against a bunch of invisible enemies. She fights them off, yelling and shouting challenges, until she kills the last one and is left, triumphant and sweat-drenched in the late afternoon sun.

"We now present," Madeline says, cupping her hands around her mouth, and she hastily does the math, twitching her fingers as she counts, "the winner of the 55th Annual Hunger Games!"

There the game stutters to a stop, because she can't make herself boom out 'Madeline' in the announcer's voice. Madeline is not a victor's name. It's not a Career name at all. It's a stupid girl name, a weak name. Madeline is the name of the girl who doesn't make it past the first thirty seconds. If Madeline is going to join the Program, she needs to change her name now.

Their last female victor was a woman named Callista. Madeline has seen her in interviews; she's beautiful in the way that fire and lightning and shining swords are beautiful, the kind you want to look at but shouldn't ever touch. When she smiles people flinch. The last time Madeline saw her in an interview, the man asked her why someone like her is still single when she could have any man in Panem.

"Oh, I have, and I do," she said, crossing her legs in a smooth motion and showing off the sharp muscle of her calf. "I guess I'm not very careful with my toys, because I just keep breaking them. But I'm always looking for more volunteers."

Madeline will never be beautiful and doesn't want to be, but she could be strong, and fearless, and make people shudder away from her. She could make herself so that no boy would ever dare to touch her unless she says so. But she can't do that as Madeline.

She stands there on the rocks, staring at her callused, dusty hands, for a long time. The sun is spewing blood red over the horizon by the time Pa comes to get her. "Let's go," he says, looking up at her. "I persuaded your mother."

Madeline keeps her expression steady. She knows what 'persuaded' means. The only good thing is that since he already had to take Madeline to the hospital, he won't have done anything that will need help. Not that that doesn't leave a whole bunch of things, especially since Mama stays home all day and they never have visitors.

"I want you to understand something," Pa says as they walk home. He lets his hand fall to the back of Madeline's neck, gripping her hard enough to hurt, and the only reason she doesn't tense is because she knows he wants her to. "You think you're smart, getting into the Program all on your own, but this is how it's going to go. You're going to make your mother and me a deal."

Madeline doesn't say anything until Pa's hand tightens, a warning, and finally she says, "What deal?"

"You can go to the Centre, that's fine. While you're there you do whatever you want, whatever they tell you. But from now on, when you're home, no more of this." He gestures with his other hand at her clothes. "We're buying you new dresses, and if I catch you touching scissors again without permission I'll make you so sorry you'll feel it at next year's Reaping, do you understand me?"

She didn't cry when Pa broke her arm, but now the urge sits in her throat, heavy and thick, and it makes the breath she sucks in wet and shaky. "Yes sir," Madeline chokes out. It's not worth it to fight, not right now. Not when she hasn't turned in the paperwork yet. Once it's official, once the Centre can promise Pa can't take her away, then she'll try again. "I really hate it," Madeline says in a small voice. "Pa, please don't make me. I'll do anything else."

Pa lets out a sigh. "Little girl, I hate to tell you, but you are a girl, and that's not gonna go away. It's just gonna get worse the older you get. You'd better get used to it now."

Madeline thinks of letting Mama braid her hair again, of walking to school with her knees brushing under the loose skirt, of having to be careful when the wind blows, of not being able to ride the swings because of the boys who stand under them, looking up and grinning and not caring who knows. Her stomach squeezes tight until she's afraid she's going to throw up all over the place.

"It's just a phase," Pa says, raising his voice over the rock crickets. There's still enough light left that Madeline doesn't risk giving him a _look_, but she does tighten her mouth. "You'll get over it and you'll be happier. Trust me."

That's probably one of the funniest things Pa has ever said, but Madeline can't laugh, and the not-laughter sits in her gut like a pile of dead butterflies.

Mama is already in bed when they get home, and Madeline knows she'll have makeup on her face when Madeline comes down for breakfast even if it's early and no one will be there to see it. Pa sends her up to bed, and Madeline takes the signed permission form and holds it to her chest as she falls asleep.

* * *

She takes the train by herself the next day after lunch. Mama offered to go with her, but Madeline recoiled so fast she hit her head against the back of her chair. She does not want to show up at the Centre with her mother and her housewife dress, her eye swollen shut even if she's covered up the worst of it. What would they think? No. There's a map and directions in the information packet the Centre sent her, and Pa backed her up because the Centre said they would pay for Madeline's fare there and back every day but not for anyone who accompanied her and they can't afford it.

Madeline wants to stand in front of the Centre building and stare - it's big, and white, and she reads the words on the front with a flutter in her heart - but she doesn't want to look like a rube, and the other kids going in, the bigger kids in their crisp white uniforms, they don't even stop. And so Madeline just marches in and follows the signs to the main office.

"Do you have any guardians with you?" asks the man behind the desk. Madeline shakes her head no, and he doesn't ask where they are or why not. "Go through that door and wait, someone will come get you soon."

It's a woman who comes to get her, tall and proud like the others, and for a second Madeline almost wishes Pa had come with her just so he could see how wrong he is about what women can and can't do. But at the same time she likes this as her secret, even though she cringes in the new dress Mama bought her in the morning and made her change into before leaving. They're probably judging her right now.

The lady doesn't say anything about Madeline's dress, just gives her a paper to sign to make it all official. At the bottom Madeline has to print her name in big block letters, and here she stops.

"Everything okay?" the woman asks.

Madeline's fingers tighten on the pen. There's a uniform on the table, neatly folded, and it's a t-shirt and pants and no skirts anywhere, not a single skirt in the whole building. "I don't like my name," Madeline says. "Can I change it? It's not a good name."

"Not legally," the woman says, but she does check the paperwork again to make sure she has Madeline's name right, and she wrinkles her nose. "You have to sign with the name your parents gave you. But under that you can write something else if you want us to call you that instead. When you're older, if you want, you might be able to get it changed."

Thunder roars in Madeline's ears. "I want to change it," she says. "Even if I have to keep Madeline at home, here I can be somebody else." There's a ribbon in her hair, even though it took Mama five minutes to tie it because everything is so short.

"Sure," the woman says. "Take your time."

With all the names in the universe in front of her, Madeline suddenly freezes, frozen by choice. She wants something strong, something fierce, something that won't sound stupid when people say it on TV. Maybe the Centre has books of names? Madeline hasn't heard that many, and she doesn't want one that's common like the ones she hears in school. They're all dumb girl names anyway.

She's about to ask if the lady has any suggestions when it hits her. Madeline swallows, and she signs her birth name on the line, then underneath takes the pen and very, very carefully prints out four letters: LYME.

"It's a rock, right?" Madeline asks, looking up. It's not quite the same as her name, but she remembers from school that spelled with an 'i' it's a fruit, and that just seems kind of dumb. "My Pa carves those."

"And a disease, spelled that way," the lady says, raising an eyebrow, and Madeline brightens. Even better. "It's a good name. If you want that's how I'll introduce you to the other kids and trainers."

"Yes please," Madeline says, and the lady nods and tells her to take the uniform to a little room to the side and change.

When she steps out, she doesn't feel like a little girl whose parents tell her what to do and make her wear dresses and hair ribbons. She doesn't feel like a girl who will one day turn into a woman who wants to get married and have babies and let her husband smack her around because it's his right as a married man. But she doesn't feel like she's pretending to be a boy, either; she still feels like a girl, but a girl who gets to decide what that means. A girl who will be able to beat up anyone who tries to tell her different.

For the first time, she thinks being a girl might not be terrible. It's a dumb think to think just because of a uniform and a new name, but she can't shake the feeling.

She leaves Madeline behind in the change room, with the dress and the ribbon and the shoes that pinch her feet. When the lady nods and tells her to follow, it's Lyme who bounces after her.


	2. Chapter 2: Lyme

"Get out of the way, baby," says a boy, Lyme's first week in the Program. He's taller than her, and he sneers down at her like that makes him better. Lyme narrows her eyes. "You don't get to use the rope in free time until you've got your bracelet."

Lyme doesn't want to admit she doesn't know what that is. She knows a lot about the Centre but she missed that part. Lucky for her, boys always like to talk about the stuff they think they know more about, even if no one asks, so she doesn't have to say anything at all. A second later he flashes his wrist in her face, and that's when she sees it, two ropes wound around his wrist, one blue, one black. "Yeah, this," he says. "You don't get one until you've been here a year, and _then_ you get to use the rope and stuff."

Lyme crosses her arms. "Is that a real rule?" she asks him. "Or did you make it up just now?"

"Who cares?" he shoots right back. "Little kids don't get to do anything if we don't say so."

There's a trainer watching. The trainers always watch. They're everywhere, standing off to the sides with their clipboards and notebooks, and they look to see what the kids do and how they act and talk to one another. Lyme doesn't know what they want or what they're looking for, but the woman leaning against the wall glances at them now, and this is important.

Lyme hauls off and punches the boy full in the face.

Except unlike the boys at school who don't know what to do, he rolls with it so her knuckles don't crack against his cheekbone, and when he comes back he's got his fist ready. Lucky for Lyme she's got enough practice with that, and he doesn't get her hard either. She gets in close, stomps on the inside of his foot, and he howls and flails out with his elbow, catching her under the eye.

They scrap after that, hard and messy, and in the end Lyme has a nosebleed and a cut on her cheek, and he has a black eye and swollen lip. The trainer yells at them both to stop for now, take a breather and get back to their games. The boy looks Lyme up and down, probably waiting to see if she'll cry, but she just wipes her nose with the clean white uniform - the blood is bright, so bright, like a badge - and finally he grunts.

"Not bad," he says, like he's a trainer, like Lyme should care what he thinks, and she doesn't, but it makes her grin anyway. "Fine, you can climb it once."

Lyme's broken arm is still in its sling, and so she doesn't make it to the top, but halfway is more than good enough one-handed - she wraps the rope around her foot to keep herself from sliding down when she changes the position of her hand - and the boy is impressed when she hits the ground again.

She has rope burn on her foot, and it makes her totter as she walks away. "Pretty good," says the trainer, walking over. "But I can show you how to do it so you don't hurt your foot."

Lyme beams.

* * *

They play a lot of games at the Centre, and it's the best ever. Running games and throwing games and hitting games, games where they hurl balls at each other and don't get in trouble from the teachers if they hit someone in the face and make their nose bleed, games where they go into a big room full of tall blocks and low walls and the lights go off and they have to find each other and tag them with a gun that doesn't have anything in it, just shoots light.

Lyme is good at all the games. She doesn't win all the time - a lot of the kids here are big and strong and good at games too - but she does learn fast how to get better. She also knows how to strategize, a word one of the trainers uses once that means being smart about things instead of just running around and smashing, and she learns how to play the games without breaking the rules, but using the rules in a way that means she has a better chance of winning.

At school, Lyme never liked team sports, but she does here. At school the other kids were slow and stupid, and the teachers never let them have any fun, but here it's different. Here the other kids are like her, tough and mean, and even the enemy team will be made of kids who don't cry if she hurts them, and the kids on her team listen to her because she's good at strategy. They listen to her and they do what she says and they win, more and more and more, and even when the other teams pick up on her tactics and she has to change them she keeps thinking of new ones.

One time they give her a team of only girls and make them play ball war against a team of only boys, and they win that too. If that happened at school the boys would have a temper tantrum, but at the Centre it's different. Here the boys swear but it's just because they lost, not because of who beat them. One boy tries to stay something grumpy about getting his butt kicked by girls, but a trainer cuffs him on the head and tells him to leave that shit at home.

The Centre is everything Lyme wanted it to be.

* * *

Madeline is more like a dream than a real person, a bad, awful, uncomfortable dream that Lyme has to have every day until she gets to the Centre and is allowed to wake up.

Sometimes she thinks Madeline is an ugly, sad caterpillar, and the Centre is like the cocoon she found underneath her windowsill one autumn. At the end of it Madeline will be gone and it's only Lyme, but for now at the end of the day Lyme has to take off the uniform and put on the dresses and go back home to her parents, but it's not real and it's not forever.

Sometimes she thinks of Madeline as a girl who's got a disease and is going to die, and when Madeline dies Lyme gets to come back and try everything over again in a way that isn't terrible.

Either way, it's easier if she thinks of them as two people. It helps her keep the Centre out of the house and away from school, which is good if she doesn't want to get hauled down to the headmaster's office every day for fighting and playing too rough at recess, if she doesn't want to go to the Centre with bruises on her legs under her uniform pants because she forgot and mouthed off to Pa and he needed to remind her that when she's home she has to mind him _or else_.

Madeline is still not a good girl - she's sullen, she's angry, and resentment boils under her skin like somebody stuck a needle full of red hot poison and keeps trying to replace her blood with it - but she knows how to keep her mouth shut and her head down. She can wear the dresses and the hair ribbons without choking, and she listens to Pa and doesn't say a word no matter how much he yells.

Lyme, on the other hand, is different. Lyme can do whatever she wants. As the months roll past and her hair grows, the Centre teachers her how to braid it tight against her scalp so it doesn't get in the way, so other kids can't grab it and pull, and so that becomes part of the transformation on the train ride into the city. She changes her clothes, braids her hair, closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, and when she's done Madeline is gone and Lyme is back. On the way home she does it the other way but it's okay, it's just a nightmare, and tomorrow Lyme gets to come back and remind herself what's really real.

* * *

For her tenth birthday, Lyme gets to test into the Transition group at the Centre, and when she passes - of course she passes - they give her a big slice of chocolate cake all to herself, and tell her to go pick out a weapon to try for the first time.

"Really?" Lyme asks. She's gotten better over the last few years, not jaded exactly but no longer gaping wide-eyed like a kid from the sticks every time the Centre gives her something shiny, but she's been watching the Transitions train with weapons for the past year now. She's sneaked into the supply room and looked at them but could never bring herself to touch any. "Anything?"

"Anything on the wall," says the trainer.

Lyme swallows and takes it all in, the racks upon racks of sharp, shiny things that she's finally allowed to touch. Most of the girls start with throwing knives; she's seen them in front of the targets, darting through the air and whipping the tiny weapons like birds, and that's great, but it's not what Lyme wants. It's too far, for one; she likes being closer, using her size and stretch to her advantage. Range weapons are for the pretty girls who can't take as many hits.

She strides over and picks up a club, a long stick of wood with a wicked metal end, spikes and sticks. It looks like it could really do some damage against the training dummies.

The trainer nods, though her mouth twitches. "You've picked yourself a tough one."

"Why?" Lyme asks, not challenging, but seeking out more information. There's a difference in the Centre. She hefts it, and it's heavy enough but not as heavy as the rocks she still has to haul around the shop with Pa.

"Maces and clubs aren't clean," the trainer explains. "A good sword will go right through, as long as you're slicing and not stabbing. Knives you can just tug right out, they're made to be used again. But a club or a mace is a one-hit weapon just because it'll take you so long to get it free you're better off just leaving it there. You sure you don't want to switch?"

Lyme frowns. "Well, maybe swords will be better later," she says. "But I picked this one. Might as well start with it."

The trainer is right. Her first strike isn't as strong as she wanted it to be - it's not that heavy to lift but turns out swinging it all the way around is harder than it looks - but even then it buries itself in the dummy's side and Lyme has to brace her foot against the base of the dummy before she can get enough leverage to yank the weapon free.

By the end of the afternoon her arms ache and her hair is stuck to her scalp with sweat. "The good news is, the sword will be easy by comparison," the trainer says, and Lyme wipes her face on her sleeve. "Here, take this and try it."

The first time Lyme swings the sword, she actually cries out before she can stop herself. The club fought her the whole way, weighing her down and glancing off the dummy at strange angles, but the sword is different. It cuts through the air in a clean arc, with the faintest whoosh of air that leaves a shiver down her spine.

Lyme stops and stares at the sword, and part of her knows it's just a cheap training weapon - they don't get the good stuff until twelve, one of the older kids told her once - but at the same time it's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. She looks up at the trainer and doesn't want to let it go.

The trainer smiles. "So you've found yours," she says. "Everyone finds at least one early on they connect with. You'll have to be versatile, which means using weapons you don't really like, but you're allowed to have a favourite even if you can't always focus on it." She picks up another sword from the top of the rack where the longer, bigger weapons sit. "You can't use this against other trainees, not yet," she warns Lyme. "But you can go a few rounds with me if you like. You've got instinctive footwork, we can start with that."

"Yes, _please_," Lyme says, even as the muscles in her arms scream.

Once they finish, the trainer makes Lyme hang up the sword herself, then runs her through exercises to do tonight so her arms won't seize. "Happy birthday," she says with a wink. Lyme grins so hard she's afraid her face will split right in half.

* * *

It's Madeline's birthday, too. That night after leaving the Centre, Madeline gets a new dress, a necklace that belonged to the grandmother that died before she was born, and her own saw at Pa's shop.

"Thanks," she says, and she loops the chain of the locket over her head, the pendant sitting heavy against her breastbone. It makes Mom smile, and Madeline doesn't care so much about that except it means they're more likely to leave her alone later.

As soon as she can she rips the necklace off, and she even checks in the mirror to make sure it didn't leave a brand on her skin. It didn't; but the training with swords that afternoon means the tops of her palms are scored with blisters and calluses.

She holds her hands against her chest, rubbing her thumbs across the raw skin to feel the sting and remind herself what's real.

* * *

Lyme liked her first few years at the Centre, but Transition is even better. She doesn't even mind sitting in the big room with the huge screen watching all the videos once a week, listening to the history of Panem and the generosity of the Capitol, because she's older now and it's easier to sit still. It's fun to watch the victors, too; they don't get to see footage of the Games yet, not until they're twelve, but they see videos of them when they were kids in training, and interviews with them after, talking about the honour of winning.

Winning is, of course, the greatest honour that any District Two citizen can receive, but Volunteering is the second. The Centre shows them the kids who Volunteered even if they didn't make it, because their sacrifice was no less great than the ones who made it home to tell their story.

It's easier and easier to imagine herself on that stage one day, talking about all the people who helped her get here, though of course Lyme knows she can't mention the Centre. It's a big secret, though she doesn't exactly understand why, and the Capitol knows but they allow the Centre to exist, and that's because the Capitol is good and protects the people loyal to it.

"The outer districts don't have Centres," says the trainer after one of the information sessions. "That's because they don't serve the Capitol as well as we do, so they don't get this privilege. Remember that."

Lyme will remember. She knows that as sure as she knows that rocks are heavy and swords are sharp and punches to the throat are more effective than the face because they don't hurt your knuckles after.

* * *

The trainees aren't allowed to use sharp weapons against each other, but they practice combat techniques using long lightweight staffs instead. It lets them practice the moves of weapon-fighting without the danger of stabbing themselves or their partner, concentrating on perfecting the craft before they go in for the kill. Instead of actual injury they mark points with strikes, against the head, limbs, and core, with double points awarded if their opponent's back hits the mat.

Lyme loves it. She's strong but she's also fast, even though she just keeps getting bigger and her muscles keep growing and she looks like she should be one of the kids who moves like an ox. She wins almost every match they put her in by letting the other person get one strike in, then jumping back in with two more so they can only ever play catch up, and never get ahead.

She knows enough not to get cocky, but there's nothing wrong with being confident.

* * *

The headmaster sends home a letter with Madeline, congratulating her for making it through an entire year without getting in any fights. He applauds the efforts of the teachers and the counsellors that went into such a feat, and encourages Madeline to keep it up next year.

She hands it to her parents and tries very hard not to laugh in everyone's faces. The only reason Madeline doesn't fight anymore is because it's boring compared to what Lyme gets to do after school. But when adults are happy that means they leave kids alone, so she doesn't say anything.

Mom gives her a kiss on the forehead and tells her she's growing up into a fine young lady after all, and Madeline bites down the retort because it doesn't matter. Let Mom think what she likes. She knows the truth.

* * *

She's eleven when the school pulls all the girls in her year into one room and sends the boys to another. That's never a good thing, and Madeline's anxiety only increases when the teacher at the front of the room says they're going to learn about puberty. Puberty is one of those things Madeline doesn't understand because she's only ever heard Mom say it, and based on her it's either a curse or the most beautiful thing in a young woman's life.

Either way it's one of those things that Madeline was promised she'd understand 'when she's older'. The idea of finally hitting an age when she's old enough for some of those scary future things makes her wish she knew how to throw up on command so she could fake sick and go to the nurse's office.

It's not much clearer even after the lecture, other than Madeline knows she doesn't want to have anything to do with it. All kinds of gross changes in her body, lots of bleeding and pain and for what, so she can make babies she doesn't want?

At the end of the first lecture, the teacher lets them write questions on a piece of paper and put them in a big box, so nobody has to be afraid. Madeline hesitates, but this teacher isn't one from their school - she's come in from the big city - and so she won't be able to recognize Madeline's handwriting. Madeline hooks her arm around her paper to hide it, and writes, "Do we get a choice?"

The teacher picks her question out of the box third and reads it out. Some of the girls snicker and glance around to see who wrote it, but Madeline isn't the only one sitting pale and tense in her seat. She can't be the only one wondering.

"Unfortunately," the teacher says, and oh no, "this is something that happens to all girls, and if it doesn't, that likely means something is wrong. But it's nothing to be afraid of."

Madeline tunes out after that, because she doesn't need to hear some strange lady talk about blossoming and womanhood and all these stupid things that Madeline will never, ever understand. She's heard enough. Whether she likes it or not, whether she wants it to or not, her body is going to change and try its best to make her into a baby-making machine, and it's up to her to keep it safe, to make sure no boy ever comes near her to do it.

Except she doesn't know how. The teacher doesn't tell them how babies get made, just talks a lot about conception and fertilization and eggs and sperm and all kinds of things that as far as Madeline's concerned have nothing to do with the human body. There are diagrams of inside organs, but nobody tells her how the stuff from inside the boy's body gets inside the girl's. She knows it's something to do with Pa and the candles and the blanket out behind the shop, but she gets the impression the teachers wouldn't like it if she asked. She's even less sure she wants to know at all, except how do you stop something from happening if you don't know what you're supposed to stop? Sex makes babies, but what _is_ it?

Madeline doesn't have a lot of friends at school anymore, but at recess most of the girls clump together in giggling groups, warding off the annoyed, curious boys and talking about what they heard. Madeline hovers around the edges, not wanting to draw attention to herself, and finally one of the other girls asks the question that's been chewing on Madeline's brain.

"But I still don't get what sex is," the girl says, exasperated. The others point and 'ooh' at her, but she just folds her arms. "Yeah, laugh all you want, but you're just pretending. You don't know what it is either, you're just faking it so you look cool. If you do know, you'll tell us."

That actually works; the girls stop laughing, and their eyes flick back and forth, shifty. Finally one of the older girls rolls her eyes. "Fine, you babies," she says. "Since you're all know-nothing _babies_, I'll tell you what it is."

Madeline listens in horror, and the longer they talk about it - the others fill in the gaps with things their parents have said when they're not listening, or what they've seen in movies they turned on by accident or caught the sitter watching late at night - the worse it gets. One of the girls darts into the side door and comes back with a crumpled pamphlet from the health office, the one for the older kids, not for them, and the cartoon diagrams show them exactly what sex is all about.

Pa did that, to Mom, without asking, just to get back at her dad for being snobby. And now either Mom has learned to like it, or learned to lie to herself enough that she doesn't go crazy, because Pa still asks for it all the time. A thousand conversations that didn't make sense before suddenly slot themselves into place.

This is what her parents say is going to happen to her someday, because she's growing up to be a woman and that's what happens.

"But why?" Madeline bursts out, and they turn to look at her, startled. She doesn't talk in school anymore; they probably can't remember the last time any of them heard her voice. "Why would you let anyone do that to you?"

It can't all be forced. Can it?

"Because it feels good," says one of the girls. She's in their year but she's turned twelve already, and she knows a lot more. She lowers her voice. "You can try it for yourself," she says. "You know, with your fingers. It feels good." The other girls squeal and rear back, but she just rolls her eyes. "I'm serious, you babies, you can 'eww' all you want, it's true."

Madeline scrambles away from the group and heads for the grass track, running and running and running until the end of recess. As they're lining up to go back inside, the older girl stops her. "Hey," she says, laying a hand on Madeline's arm. "It's okay to be scared, that's what the nurse told me. But try it for yourself, you'll see, you'll like it."

It sounds crazy, but that night Madeline jams her door closed with books and rocks stolen from the back yard, and she tries it. It does feel good, in an uncomfortable sort of way, curling in her stomach and shooting all the way down to her feet; what's worse is that it feels incomplete, like an itch she can't quite reach, like there's more waiting but she doesn't know how to do it.

Mom was right. It's happening, and there's nothing Madeline - or Lyme - can do to stop it.

She makes it out of bed - her feet twist in the sheets and she nearly falls - and down the hallway to the bathroom before puking all over the sink. Mom wakes up and runs to ask her if she's all right, but Madeline can't answer her, just cries and cries and curls into a ball, pressing herself into the corner between the cabinet and the wall. Finally Pa comes in, picks her up and carries her to bed, and Mom sits next to her on a chair and strokes her hair, telling her it'll be all right.

It won't be all right. Not ever. Not when Madeline is finally _old enough_. But crying herself to sleep is a baby thing to do and right now Madeline really, really doesn't want to grow up, and so she does.

* * *

The next day at the Centre, Lyme finds a trainer. "I need to know how to protect myself," she says. Her eyes still hurt from crying, and her face feels tight and painful.

The trainer's eyes dip down to her neck and arms, the first places bruises from Pa usually show up. "That's what we're teaching you," she says.

"Not from that." Lyme's breath hitches in her chest, and it's weak and stupid but she presses her hands below her throat to try to force herself to calm down. She glances around, but there's nobody in hearing, and she can trust the trainers. She can always, always trust the Centre. They promised. "They told us about puberty yesterday," Lyme says in a whisper, and each word feels like she has to rip it out of her skin. "And babies and - and sex. That's what I want to protect against. I don't ever want a boy to do that to me. I won't be like my mom." The panic rises again, and she digs her fingers into her skin. "I can't."

The trainer's cheek twitches. "Come with me," she says.

"But weapons training is supposed to start in five minutes," Lyme says. You never, ever skip weapons training.

"Just this once," the trainer says, using the 'don't question me' voice, and so Lyme shuts her mouth and follows.

The trainer takes her to the nurse's office, where the nurse introduces Lyme to another piece of Centre magic - this time straight from the Capitol, is there anything they can't do - called birth control.

"All the girls who go into Residential take it," the nurse says. She lets Lyme hold the package, a small cardboard sheet with thirty tiny pills attached to it. "We can't have a quarter of your training interrupted with cramps and bleeding and everything else. All the female tributes receive an injection when they first arrive in the Capitol, too. You've never seen a tribute messing around with tampons; that wouldn't be good TV at all."

The hand squeezing Lyme's chest slowly loosens its grip. "So if I stay, I never have to worry about babies or any of that other stuff ever again?"

The nurse smiles. "That's right. The last thing we need is for anyone in the Program to waste time worrying about something we could easily prevent. We want you at your best at all times."

Lyme used all her crying up last night; now she just grips the chair until her hands hurt, and swings her feet like she's a little kid again. "But the other stuff, the - the sex stuff. That won't help with that, if a boy wants it and I don't."

This time the nurse raises her eyebrows. "Well, are we teaching you to fight, or aren't we?"

Lyme smiles.

* * *

Mom and Pa are fighting again. Madeline lost track about what this time - money, the Centre, sex, Pa's drinking, that woman he got caught with the nights he said he was working late - and she wouldn't even bother to pay attention except that for once Mom is shouting back, and Madeline can count the number of times that's happened on one hand, though she needs two for the broken bones afterward.

Their voices carry up through the floor. "I should just walk out that door and leave you," Mom yells. "I never should have gone with you in the first place. I should've just sucked it up and gone back to my old man!"

"And done what, suck dick for spare change when he cut you off for being a slut?" Pa challenges. Madeline flinches because she knows what all those words mean now.

"He told me he'd forget the whole thing ever happened if I got an abortion," Ma shoots back, and that's a word Madeline still doesn't know. The way Mom spits it out, the way Pa's stunned silence floats up from the first floor the same as the loudest cries, tells her it must not be a nice one. "But no, I couldn't do that to the baby. I thought we'd be better off with you. And look where that got me!"

Pa's still shocked, but he gets his control back enough to use his threatening voice. "You wanna say that again?"

"I'm still young!" Mom says, like she's not even listening. "I could make something of myself, go somewhere far away and do something. I don't know why I stay here with you!"

"Because you know the truth," Pa says. "Because no matter what little castles you build for yourself in your head, you know none of them are real. As soon as you step outside that door you become exactly what you are, a woman with no skills and no education who got herself knocked up at fourteen and has no idea how to take care of herself. You run away, you'll come back in a week, begging me to take you back."

"Maybe I'll take my chances!"

"Maybe I'll let you!"

Madeline knows what's coming, and she stuffs the pillow into her ears to muffle the sounds until she falls asleep.

* * *

The next morning at the breakfast table, Pa is gone, and Mom is mutinous despite the bruises. She slams the pots and cupboard doors as she makes the food, and the plate actually cracks when she drops it in front of Madeline. The eggs are cooked so hard the edges are black and Madeline's knife won't even cut them, so she shoves the rubbery mess in her mouth and swallows it whole.

"Mom?" Madeline says, watching her without moving her head. She's never seen Mom this mad, not the following day, anyway. Usually Pa's managed to persuade her to behave by them. "If you leave, will you take me with you?"

Mom stops. "What makes you think I'm leaving?"

"I heard you last night." Madeline tries to imagine what it is that got Mom this mad. "Is it because of Dad and that lady?"

Mom freezes, her fingers digging into a drinking glass like she thinks she could dent it. "I'm twenty-six," she says, like that means something. "I'm _twenty-six_, and all I've ever done is give him everything he wants, when he wants it, whether I want to or not, and what does he do? He goes off with some slut who was ten years old when his daughter was born!"

'Slut' is a new word for Madeline, but she finally realized it means a girl who lets a boy have sex with her. 'Prude' is the word for the girls who don't. The Capitol likes the first better than the second, but it's not the Capitol out here. Being a slut, Madeline has learned, is something that's only okay if you have money, like dying your hair purple and putting diamonds on your eyelashes. She doesn't understand it, but she's trying.

"If you leave, take me with you," Madeline says again. She doesn't like Mom but at least Mom doesn't hit her, and if Madeline has no respect for her as a victim who never learned to fight, the pity and disdain she feels is still better than the outright, burning hate she has for Pa.

Mom sighs, and she puts down the glass and runs a hand over her face. "I'm not leaving, baby girl," she says. Madeline tries not to curl her lip at the nickname. "But if I do, sure, I'll take you with me."

Madeline eats her cereal, content. She goes to school, aces her test on history - it was on the Dark Days, and the Centre has a lot of information sessions on that - and wins three out of three sparring matches at the Centre. Pa's in a foul mood at the shop but Madeline doesn't care, and she's humming to herself when they walk home and find the house empty.

"Kate?" Pa hollers, but there's nothing, no answer. He runs into their room and immediately bursts into a flood of swearing; Madeline follows, keeping out of range, and peeks through the door just enough to see the dressers upended, the clothes in Mom's half missing.

Madeline lets Pa whirl around and whack her across the face because that gets it out of his system, and then she's safe to hide in her room and disappear. She sits on her bed, knees drawn up to her chest, while Pa rages downstairs, smashing every dish in the house and slamming the doors over and over and over. His footsteps stomp around the house like a monster.

"You liar," Madeline hisses, staring out the window. Mom said she'd take Madeline with her. Sure she hadn't said the words 'I promise' and they didn't write it down or anything, but she _said_. Now there's no chance, no way for Madeline to go anywhere until residential, and no one else to take Pa's anger. It's all up to her now. "You're a _fucking_ liar!"

Pa doesn't call her down for supper. It's good, because Madeline couldn't eat anything anyway.

* * *

Pa's gone to the shop when Madeline wakes up the next morning, same as always, except this time the house is quiet and cold and doesn't smell like breakfast. It throws her for a minute - Mom must be sick, or maybe Pa hurt her bad enough she can't get out of bed - but then she remembers. It's lucky she wakes up at the same time every morning anyway, just out of habit, or she might have been late for school.

Mom is gone, and no matter what Pa says, Madeline doesn't think she's going to come crawling back. Maybe Grandaddy had been mad at Mom when she wouldn't have the abortion, whatever that meant, but after eleven years, he'd probably just be glad to have her back. Especially if she came without Pa and the baby he forced on her. And Mom is young, like she said - twenty-six sounds awfully old to Madeline, but Mom didn't seem to think so - and maybe she can learn something new, do something with herself. Maybe she won't bother going to Grandaddy at all, but will head right into the city and make her fortunes there. Who knows.

Madeline should feel something. It's the kind of thing Mom would have said, if she were still here, that good little girls should feel sad when their mamas run away, even if those mamas never said I love you unless they wanted something, even if all they ever did was push dresses and hair brushes and jewellery like they mattered. It's still Madeline's mother, and that means something.

Madeline digs deep, like the Centre tells her to when they have acting lessons - pretend you just won a lot of money in a contest; pretend your favourite toy got thrown away - and searches inside herself for the kind of feelings that would make her a nice little girl. She thinks of Mom's hands, always soft when they held the ice to Madeline's cheek after one of Pa's rages. Mom's fears when she talked about what would happen to Madeline if she wasn't careful. Mom's cooking, which if not amazing was at least not terrible, and how she never forgot that Madeline hated onions and always tried to hide them inside her casseroles instead of putting them on top.

Nothing. No tears, no hitched breaths, no secret well of sadness inside her. The harder Madeline looks, the more it's like scrabbling at the remnants of a fire with her fingers and burning her hands on the hot coals at the bottom; the only thing she finds is anger, sharp and bitter and twisting. Mom left her. She left Madeline with Pa, even though she had to know what would happen, and she didn't care.

Madeline didn't love Mom, so it's fair enough that Mom didn't love her, especially since Madeline ruined her life by being born and sticking her with Pa. It makes sense. But there's not loving your kid and there's leaving them behind, and maybe Madeline was stupid but she didn't think Mom hated her _that_ much.

Well. Now she knows, for all the good it does her. Madeline gets up, pulls on her clothes, and almost makes herself an egg for breakfast, but stops with the pan in her hand, her mind agog with horror. With Mom gone, that means Pa will expect her to do all the chores. Chores are a man's work, and now all the cooking and cleaning and everything else that Mom did all day while Madeline was at school, that's her job now, because Pa wouldn't do it before and he sure won't do it now that he's mad.

Madeline puts the pan back in its drawer, rips a chunk of bread from the loaf with her hands, and gnaws on that dry. Her stomach turns. How is she supposed to go to school, and the Centre, and help Pa at the shop, and still keep the house running? There's no way to do it all, but she knows what Pa will do if she doesn't.

For the first time, Madeline actually understands the fear that drove Mom to scrub the bathtub at three in the morning because she woke and remembered she hadn't done it. Unless Madeline quits school, the Centre, or sleeping, there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything Pa will demand her. She doesn't really like school, but faced with the idea of having to give it up, now Madeline thinks of the boring building and the chalkboards and the stupid, useless students with panicked affection.

She runs, arriving at school well before the morning bell. For the first time in years, Madeline makes her way across the little kids' playground to the primary wing of the school, and she walks through the hallways, looking at the tiny water fountains and low shoe lockers until she finds Mrs. Sullivan's classroom.

Mrs. Sullivan looks the same - four years moves differently for grownups than kids, Madeline has found - and she glances up from her desk with a surprised smile. "Madeline!" she says, but one glance at Madeline's face and her expression goes serious. "What happened?"

It's stupid. Madeline should go, it's not like Mrs. Sullivan is her teacher anymore, but she bursts out the whole thing, twisting her hands in her skirt. "He'll make me quit school," Madeline finishes, digging her hands into her hair. It's long again, and with a wrench in her gut she wonders if she could cut it now that Mom's gone, or if Pa will just ratchet back even harder into having a girl around to take care of the house for him. "He says there's no use in my being educated anyway."

"He won't," Mrs. Sullivan says, furious. If she weren't so dark Madeline guesses there would be red spots on her cheeks. "It's illegal to keep children out of school. You're allowed to take the afternoons off for the Centre, but he can't keep you home. This isn't District Twelve!"

Madeline doesn't know what that means either, other than school has told her District Twelve is dirty and terrible and they should be grateful and privileged to live in District Two. "Are you sure?"

"Talk to the Centre," Mrs. Sullivan says. Her mouth is in a thin line whenever she's not talking, and her hand shakes. "They'll help you. They give your father a stipend to take care of you, that means he can't just do as he likes."

Madeline doesn't hug grownups, she never has, but Mrs. Sullivan makes her think more about it than any other person alive. "I will," she says.

"Good." Mrs. Sullivan smiles, and she still never touches Madeline without permission but she does point to her bicep. "You're getting strong."

Madeline looks at her arms; when the light hits them right, her muscles cast a shadow. She can lift more than any girl in her age group at the Centre, and more than the lankier boys. The big ones from the quarries can still beat her, but they're not as fast. "Thanks," she says.

* * *

The Centre agrees. They're not babysitters, which is why Madeline isn't the only one who comes through the doors with bruises that don't get put there while behind their walls, but they do have an interest in their kids not being taken advantage of. They tell Madeline not to worry, that Pa can't keep her out of school just to be his servant, and if he tries they'll get someone to call the house and set him straight. Madeline doesn't care so much about being hit now that she knows how to take one and keep fighting, but the thought of doing nothing but cooking and cleaning in her spare time was enough to terrify her, and this lets her breathe again.

For a few days she doesn't have to think about it. Pa doesn't talk to her at all when she comes to the shop after the Centre - later, now, by an hour or two every day now that she's in Transition - and he stays out late even after he sends her home. Apart from those few hours where they work at the blocks in silence, Madeline doesn't see Pa at all, which suits her fine. Maybe he's waiting for Mom to come home; maybe he's given up. She doesn't actually care. She's just glad she doesn't have to deal with him.

Except that around a week after Mom left, Madeline checks the fridge and all the cupboards and finds that the food is gone. It hits her that Mom must have done all the home budgeting and shopping herself, what with Pa out at work all day, and just like the cleaning - the dishes piling in the sink, dust gathering on every surface, the laundry sitting in an increasing lump by the washing machine - Pa hasn't even thought about doing any of it himself.

Madeline can't figure out how Pa is feeding himself; she gets by with nicking things from kids' lunches at school, an apple here and half a sandwich there, not enough that anyone will yell at her too much, and from the snacks they give her at the Centre, but there's nothing for breakfast or supper, and Pa has to be eating somewhere. She follows him one night after he leaves the shop, and he goes right for a bar and stays there until late. They must have food there, and that's why he hasn't bothered.

Madeline makes up her mind not to do a lick of work on Pa's behalf, but she has to have clothes to wear, and she needs to eat. And so, after she gets home the next day, her stomach gnawing at itself, Madeline takes only her clothes and towels and does a load of laundry, putting everything back in her drawers. That night she waits up, doing training exercises from the Centre - shadow boxing, stretches, sword patterns with Pa's discipline ruler instead of a weapon - until footsteps sound outside and Pa stumbles home.

"I want money for food," Madeline says. He stares at her, bleary, his hand still on the knob, either having forgotten it's there or not wanting to let go in case he falls. "The Centre gives you a stipend. You have to feed me."

"I don't have to do nothin'," Pa slurs, his lip curled. "Why don't you go on and run off after your Ma and leave me in peace?"

Madeline stands her ground. "Give me the food tickets, then." She read the paperwork; she knows it's not just money that arrives in the big envelope every month, because not a few parents would spend it on anything but their kids if it was. "You're not using them down at Shady's."

It's true; only some places will take the tickets, and the bar isn't one of them. Pa scowls at her, and Madeline wants to shift to an aggressive stance, crossing her arms and turning out her feet, but she doesn't. If she can do this without a fight, even better; that's something the bigger, nastier kids at the Centre don't understand. You don't _always_ have to do it with punching.

"Fine," Pa snorts after a long staring match. There's defeat in the slump of his shoulders that Madeline has never seen before, and she'd feel bad for him except - no, she really doesn't, not even enough to pretend. She keeps her expression neutral. "Take the tickets then." He heads into his room and comes back with a handful of coloured paper - there's a certain amount for bread, milk, vegetables and meats, portioned out so the kids have a balanced meal at home - and throws it in Madeline's direction. They flutter to the ground like leaves in the dead autumn air; he grunts and goes back to his room.

Madeline gathers up the tickets, spreads them out on the kitchen table, and makes a list with the paper and pen Mom used to keep in the drawer by the phone. There's no way she's using her tickets for food that Pa can steal; she'll keep what she can in her room, and anything that needs the fridge she'll just buy for one day at a time. That means no milk for breakfast, but Madeline can deal with that. If she really wants it later she can rig up something and keep it in the creek out back, like the time her class went camping.

She's not cleaning anything she doesn't touch, either. As the weeks pass, Madeline cleans her dishes, washes her clothes, and tidies up all her messes while leaving everything else alone. It means parts of the house have a neat dividing line but she doesn't care, let it look stupid. The only thing Madeline compromises on is the garbage, taking out anything that might rot and smell, but she leaves the bottles and cans alone, picking around them if she has to.

Pa doesn't say a word.

* * *

At the Centre she just keeps working harder. Each week she picks a different kid to have an invisible contest with based on who the trainers are paying attention to; without being too obvious about it Lyme tries to beat their time when running or climbing, and she angles herself to get paired with them in sparring practice. The trainers notice but they don't say anything because it's not against the rules and they like to see initiative, a word Lyme has learned to love and can't help puffing up when she hears.

"What are you trying to prove, anyway?" one of the girls in her year asks her one day, getting all up in her face after Lyme beat her on the ropes course. The girl is big and strong and pretty, and this one got under Lyme's skin more, the need to win win win, and so she made it back down when the girl was still on her way to the top.

"That I'm better than you," Lyme sneers. She doesn't cock her hip because that's what the pretty girls do, she just stands up tall and square and curls her lip just a little.

"Better watch it," the girl says and stomps off, but the trainers saw. The trainers see everything, and Lyme gets a whole peach to herself. She eats it in the main common room, making loud slurping noises and wiping the juice from her chin with her forearm. It's a good day.

There are a lot of good days.

* * *

Madeline wakes up in the middle of the night because Pa is crashing through the house, shouting and throwing things and kicking things out of the way, things that clank and rattle and thud as they roll over the floor. "The place is a mess!" he screams. "What is this? I work hard all day and come home to a pigsty? Where do you think we live?"

Madeline's heart pounds, but she doesn't answer, just slips out of bed and makes sure everything in her room that's important is hidden, in the back of her closet or under clothes in her drawer or behind books on the desk. All visible open spaces in her room are clear, from the tops of her dresser and desk to the empty shelf running along the wall over her bed. She doesn't have that much anyway; Residential kids are only allowed to take a box of stuff with them, at least so the whispers go, and so Madeline makes sure there's nothing she cares about that won't fit into one with everything else.

It's a while before Pa crashes into her room and turns on the light by slamming his hand against the wall until he finds the switch; by then Madeline is back in bed and feigning sleep. "Wha-" she says, rubbing at her eyes theatrically. It wouldn't win Lyme any points in the Centre, but this is home and Pa is flaming mad and his face is all red from rage and probably drinks so she has to play it up a little.

"I'm sick of this place being a mess," Pa shouts. He has a garbage bag in his hand, the sides bulging out. There's a tear down one side where he shoved something in without paying attention. "You know the rules. Anything on the floor goes in the trash."

He looks around the room, but there's nothing, not even a sock. Madeline sits up slowly, composing herself, and when Pa whirls, she just looks at him, her face calm. "Nothing on the floor in the house is mine," Madeline says. She feels the same thrill of fear as the time the trainers first made her jump from one balance beam to the other, like the game of "floor is lava" she used to play as a kid only with stakes that matter. "The mess is yours."

That shakes him, but only for a second, and then the scowl is back. "Well, it's not my job to clean!" he says, pointing at her. "Your mama left so now it's up to you, little girl."

Madeline lets out a long breath. "No," she says. "It's not. I clean my messes. You clean yours."

"Are you disrespecting me?" Pa asks. He actually sounds shocked, which is almost funny.

Madeline will laugh later, but right now she can't. It's not the time for that. Different thoughts run through her head, the Centre and acting lessons and how to play for the cameras and read the audience and know what they're looking for - memories, the belt and the buckle and the pain, blood on her arms, her legs, on her back where she can't reach to clean it, standing in the shower so the water washes away the scabs - and she wants to keep hiding under the blankets but she can't.

Madeline slides out of bed and lands with a heavy thump. "I'm not," she says, keeping her voice level. It's the voice that the big kids use when they're practicing going in for the kill, low and calm and in the middle between the sing-song playful of chasing at the beginning and the crazy at the end. "But you're not a baby and I'm not your slave. You can clean your own messes now."

Pa's face contorts, and for a second Madeline is seven years old again as he drops the bag and pulls off his belt. Except this time he's drunk and it takes him a few tries and Madeline sleeps with a knife under her pillow that she stole from the kitchen. He doesn't even have the buckle open by the time Madeline has the knife in her hand, the handle tucked tight against her palm.

"Don't," Madeline says, and Pa looks up. His face goes pale. It's a kitchen knife, made for cutting meat, not people, but that doesn't matter. In the Arena there are no promises for what the tributes get, and she's still in Transition but they've practiced with non-standard weapons already. "You don't get to touch me again."

"Yeah?" Pa challenges, but his hand stays. "Who died and made you boss?"

"Nobody," Madeline says, and she takes a step forward and bares her teeth. "Yet."

Pa's nostrils flare. "Are you threatening me, little girl?"

This is it. Madeline expected to feel more afraid, but instead there's nothing but an icy calm spreading through her. She shifts her grip on the knife. "Just try me," she says, and it scares her how much she wants him to. "Give me the chance," Madeline says, and suddenly she's not Madeline at all. Madeline is gone, Madeline is sleeping, and it's all Lyme now, Lyme holding the knife and turning her grin sharp like a wolf's and Lyme sliding forward one soft footfall at a time. "I want to. And no one would care because you're a deadbeat piece of shit, everybody says so. So no, really. Give me the chance."

Pa takes a step back, and yeah, it feels good, but Lyme knows not to push it. "You have to sleep sometime," Pa says, trying to gather himself.

"Yeah," Lyme says, and narrows her eyes. "So do you."

They stare for a long, long time. Finally Pa turns and storms out of the room, slamming the door behind him and leaving the trash bag. Lyme counts to ten, lets out a breath, and then Madeline picks up the bag, opens the door, and sets the bag back down in the hallway outside. She climbs back into bed, puts the knife under her pillow - all with even, rhythmic movements, like she's being watched and graded on economy of motion - then bursts into hysterical laughter with both hands over her mouth.

Even if Madeline can never sleep in the house again - even if she has to sneak up onto the roof, or catch naps at recess or during free time to make up for it - it's worth it.

* * *

Lyme cuts her hair again, short and almost to the scalp. The trainer at the Centre takes one look at her, smacks her own forehead, and drags her into a room with lots of scissors and brushes and gets someone else to even it up for her. "You can have short hair without looking like you got your head gnawed on by a mutt," the trainer says, cuffing Lyme on the back of the head when they finish, and Lyme just grins and scampers off.

Pa isn't careful with the accounting either, and so Madeline starts intercepting the Centre packages and nicking some of the cash vouchers every month. Soon she's got enough that she can go out and buy herself clothes without having to steal them or beat anyone up. It's the first time she's had new clothes, not worn by anyone, that she actually wants to wear, and it's hard for Madeline not to spend an entire evening just taking off shirts and putting on new ones and rolling around in the feeling of being exactly who she wants to be.

Pa notices, obviously, but he just stares at her, his jaw clenched. "My dresses got too small," Madeline says, and it's not even a lie. She's hitting her first growth spurt, and the skirts that were below the knee are now three fingers above, which means she can't wear them to school. "Boy's clothes are cheaper and easier to grow into. Just thought I'd be practical."

He gives her a look that says she ain't fooling anyone, but Madeline just stares him down and finally he grunts and turns away.

* * *

They don't talk at all anymore. That suits Madeline just fine.

* * *

The first year Lyme is old enough to stand in the square with the other eligible Reaping candidates is the first time she's Lyme outside the Centre for long periods of time. But Madeline had the blue dress with the scratchy lace on the collar and under her arms, Madeline had her hair braided into pigtails and secured with ribbons, Madeline wore a pearl necklace that Mama gave her, and Madeline held on to her mother's hand and stood very quiet behind the barrier like all the other girls.

Lyme stands in the square, tall and proud, sneaking glances at the wrists of all the kids and noticing how they stand in bunches, all the ones with Centre bracelets. Lyme has cropped hair and fresh boy's clothes and five black strands around her wrist. Lyme got up and dressed on her own and took the train and made it down to the square before Pa even got out of bed. He's probably not even at the central Reaping location, he's probably just at the one closest to home. District Two is too big to hold everyone together like in Twelve, but most of the Centre kids make the trek into town.

The sun beats down on the back of her neck, and Lyme knows she should pay attention to the details but she's not thirteen yet - next year she'll be watching the whole Games from inside Residential - and now she's just impatient. The thing about the Hunger Games is that no matter what the people on TV say, it's not exciting to watch. If you watch they're just kind of awful, it's kids killing each other and most of the deaths aren't even good, they're just sad, starving and bleeding and freezing and crying for their mommies.

It's the Careers that make the Games, the Careers that make it more than just kids dying with no purpose, and all Lyme wants is to be there, to do her duty and fight and make everyone in Panem see how good she is, how smart and strong and clever and brave she is. The killing part - well, Lyme hasn't quite fixed that in her head yet, but they'd die anyway, right, and at least she can make it fast because a big girl like her isn't the kind who can get away with torture like some of the smaller, meaner ones - she can figure out later. For now it's about winning, and Lyme's mind jumps over the middle bit and skips to the part where she comes home with the crown and the applause and gets to live in a big house full of other people who are good at things and no one ever judges her again.

She barely pays attention to the tributes this year, a lithe, beautiful girl and the biggest boy Lyme's ever seen on the stage in all her years of remembering. She's too busy thinking about six years from now, when she can be on that stage herself, the first female tribute from District Two not to wear a dress, to stand up there as big and imposing and powerful as the boys.

* * *

She feels a little bad a month later, when it's Brutus, the boy from Two, who makes it back home alive with nine Arena kills to his name - five boys, four girls, not a new record but a tie for the standing one, and every one of them brutal. She didn't pay much attention during, what with school and training and work and everything else, and Lyme is twelve and that means studying for her Centre Exam every minute she doesn't absolutely have to do anything else. She doesn't have time for the Games, not this year; that's for when she's thirteen, safe in the Centre with the other Residential trainees, and can sit with the trainers and get the whole thing dissected down in ways they can understand. But then at the Centre there's an announcement that Brutus won it, and they stop everything and give cake and ice cream to all the kids and they don't have to train for the rest of the day.

Pa likes Brutus, is the only thing that throws a pall on it. Brutus is everything a Two and a man should be, Pa says once, gesturing at the TV. Brutus wouldn't let a girl boss him around or make him do his own cooking. Pa sends Madeline a sharp look when he says it, even though he long gave up the fight to try to make her do his chores for him.

Madeline rolls her eyes, and she uses Lyme's voice to tell him to go fuck himself. Pa hisses, but she just strolls out of the room, flicking the knife she now keeps on her at all times, and he doesn't say anything else.

Still, she's happy when he wins, of course she is, and she stands with the other Centre kids in the main square when he comes home, jostling adults out of the way who let them go when they see the crowd of perfect, pretty children too muscled and confident to be normal. Brutus sees them too, catches them in the crowd as they wave their arms with the identical black bracelets, and he gives them a small, private smile that's just for them.

* * *

The months coming up to Lyme's thirteenth birthday are a blur, her and the other twelve-year-olds. It's easy to tell who's coming up to their Centre Exam even without counting bracelet strands, because they're the kids off by themselves, muttering numbers and names and death counts under their breath because one of the tests is being able to rattle off any death in Hunger Games history that the trainers could possibly want to know. Lyme - there's less and less Madeline now, even at home - covers the walls in her bedroom with the names, all one thousand, one hundred twenty eight of them, dismayed that by the time she takes her test the ones from Brutus' year will be added on.

She doesn't bother studying any normal lessons at school, just bends over her desk, scrawled with notes and Games statistics, flashes her bracelet whenever a teacher tries to ask her a question she doesn't know off the top of her head. None of the other Centre kids studying for the Exam have to do anything in regular school; they'll be pulled out of it permanently in a few weeks, and if the Centre doesn't think it'll help them in the Arena then they don't need to know it, and the teachers just let them do their own thing. Soon Madeline won't even bother going at all.

Soon _Madeline_ will be dead. Lyme can't wait.

It's a weird kind of camaraderie, looking at other kids and seeing the same harried, shadow-eyed exhaustion on their faces. They pair up at lunch and recess, quizzing each other on the deaths, until it becomes a twisted sort of playground game that's all too real.

"How many deaths by blunt force trauma?" she asks the boy who's her unofficial partner today.

He screws up his face in thought. "Just the ones that ended instantly, or the ones that bleed out later?"

"That would be blood loss, then," she snaps. "Don't be stupid!"

"Right!" He hunches, then closes his eyes. "One hundred seventy-six." She nods, and he lets out a breath. "Go through all the starvation deaths by Games year, backwards."

* * *

There's one more test included in the exam, even harder than the others - you're allowed to slip up on the death list questions if you catch yourself, it's not an automatic fail - that decides it all. It's the one they don't talk about, though the trainers have already taken them into the room filled with animals in cages and what they're for.

Some of the kids have practiced, and it's common enough that the trainers don't crack down on it as long as the kids don't get themselves caught. One of the big kids offered to show Lyme, but she said no; after the first one they'll tell her how to do it right, how to deal with it properly, and there's no point in practicing a bunch of times the wrong way.

That's all it is, it's not like she's nervous. Lyme knows what the Centre is, what it's for, what its graduates go on to do. She's not stupid, and she is prepared. Madeline isn't so sure, but Madeline won't be the one doing it, now will she.

Lyme just hopes they give her a knife. According to some of the older kids, they don't always, and one girl looks her up and down and says "You're big for your age, they'll probably want you to do it by hand."

She picks up some rocks on the way home and keeps them in her pockets at all times, and whenever she has a minute she takes them out and squeezes them until her hands bleed in the hopes it strengthens her grip. She grabs sticks from the backyard and practices breaking them in quick, clean gestures. One time she chooses a stick that's too big, too green, and instead of snapping it twists in her hand, the bark splintering and the wood inside warping, and no matter how much she wrenches it side to side she can't make the pieces come apart. In the end it's a mess of torn fibres and jagged ends, and it's just a stick - it's _just a stick_ - but Lyme turns and vomits into the grass anyway.

* * *

The weird thing is, Lyme got rid of all her horror that time out back in the yard with the sticks. When it's time to do it for real, her throat tightens and her stomach jumps but then she does it and it's done, and she's sitting there looking at the tiny little body in her hands and it's over, it's over, it's dead, and she should want to throw up but she doesn't. She just stares at it and thinks how easy it was. If it'll be this easy next time. Her legs shake a little when she stands, and she can't look to see what they do with the body when they take it away, but it's over, and she takes a breath, then another, and another, and she's not sick at all.

Lyme aces the rest of the exam, the physical and the sparring match and the weapons test and the history test, and she goes right through the odd-numbered female deaths and all the deaths by drowning and the years where over half the deaths were Arena-related without even a hiccup. It's like every part of her brain not related to the testing disappears until she's sharp and focussed, and it's only at the end when they tell her she's made it, she's in, that she realizes how fast her heartbeat is, and when she shifts her shoulders her shirt sticks to her back.

* * *

They give her a week to say goodbye to family. "Do I have to take it?" she asks, looking at the paper she'll make Pa sign tonight or else she'll stab him in the leg.

The trainer raises an eyebrow. "No," she says.

Lyme lets out a breath. "Good," she says. "See you tonight."

In the end she doesn't even bother with the box of things she's allowed to take with her. There's nothing in that house she ever needs to see again. She does wait to say goodbye to Pa, even after he's already signed the paperwork under threat of being knifed in his sleep, just because it would feel strange if she didn't. Like leaving a splinter lodged under her fingernail.

"So," Pa says. He's awkward, which is a new one, but she doesn't know how else to class it. He keeps shifting, scuffing his foot against the floor like he's a kid who's done something bad, and he rubs a hand over the back of his neck. "This is it, huh."

"Yep." She's not sure what she wants to say to him, and she's sure not going to cry into her pillow tonight, but it feels weird. There's a thread of connection between them that she wishes wasn't there but she can't just walk away with it still there. She has to cut it, or rip it out, or something.

Pa bites his lip and glances around the room, and for a second he looks lonely, a guy in an empty house with everyone gone except him, but there's not an ounce of sympathy left inside her. Not even now that the only bruises on her body are the ones other kids at the Centre put there. But it's not anger either, she's surprised to realize; it's something else, something less sharp and ragged. Anger feels like the jagged edge of a soup can after she saws at it with their half-broken can opener, likely to catch on things and cut and infect. This is like a whole lot of nothing. Her literature teacher would probably call it 'apathy'; he tried to explain it once and she said "so it's a fancy word for having no fucks to give?" and he just sighed at her.

It's not that exactly, but it's close. After years and years of looking at Pa and feeling the hate boiling up inside her until it presses out her eyeballs and oozes through her pores, now it's nothing. It's not forgiveness - no, he'll never get that, he doesn't deserve it, and ah there's the anger flashing out for a second - it's just that she doesn't care. She's leaving. He'll never be part of her life ever again; even if she washes out tomorrow she'll go into the post-Program dorms set up by the Centre until she's old enough to support herself. This is it.

All those years of living in fear and rage, they all sit behind her, and all she can think is that he used to look so big, so strong, and now she sits and calculates six different ways to kill him just with stuff lying around the room.

"My little girl, all grown up and off to kill people," Pa says, with an edge to his voice, but he's trying too hard, he's fishing, like the days he wanted to get on Mom's nerves because he liked seeing her twitch.

"And you get paid for it," she says. She's not playing that game. "Lucky you."

A muscle in Pa's cheek jumps, and that's enough. She has nothing else to say to him, and staying longer isn't going to help her find it. She catches his eye and stares him down. "Next time you see me, you won't recognize me," she says.

Pa snorts. "I believe it. I already don't know who you are anymore."

That, weirdly enough, gets a reaction, like she held a match too long and it burned down and stung her fingers. "You never did," she snaps, and leaves him behind.

One time in history the teacher mentioned that in olden times stopping outside a town and shaking the dust off your shoes was one of the strongest ways to insult someone, something about how they were so unworthy you didn't even want to be connected by walking on the same dirt. It sounded melodramatic and silly, but as she walks away across the line of Pa's property, she stops and looks back, and something makes her pick up her feet and pound them against the ground until the soles of her shoes are clean.

It helps, but it doesn't really stick until she makes it to the main Centre building and the doors shut behind her. Even the air inside is filtered - with so many kids inside, they're fanatical about making sure they don't all get sick from someone's runny nose - and when the door shuts, there's a low hiss that marks the pressure change and that gets her in the chest.

Lyme gives the permission form to the head trainer. "Good," the woman says. "We've got your name change forms, if you still want to do that. All you have to do is sign and we'll send it off."

Lyme sucks in a breath. "And then what?" she asks. "That's my name everywhere?"

"Yes." The trainer smiles, and it's not huge and effusive or anything, but it's real. "It'll be on every document about you for the rest of your life. If you Graduate, that'll be the one on record at the Capitol and used in all coverage."

Lyme snatches the pen so fast she slams the tips of her fingers against the desk by accident, but she doesn't care. "And I'll never have to wear dresses, right?" she asks, looking across the desk. "I was promised."

"Everyone has to try out different looks," the trainer says. "In the Capitol the tributes don't get to choose what their stylists do, but the mentors do have to okay it, and we do go with the image that suits you best. I don't think dresses will be the way to go."

It's not the easy guarantee they gave her when she was seven, but Lyme is older now, and not so naive or desperate. She knows that her life belongs to the Centre now, to the Capitol and to Panem, but all she needs is their word of honour to try. "Okay," she says. All she has to do is build her image early, so that by the time she has stylists they won't be able to put her in a dress without it clashing horribly. That won't be hard.

"Welcome to Residential," the trainer says, and it would feel anticlimactic except Lyme already had the ceremony where they made her recite the pledge and her promise to serve the Capitol until the day she died, so this is just a formality. "I'll show you to your room."

* * *

Three months into her stay at Residential, Lyme is sparring with another trainee a couple of years older when her gut spasms and clenches and she goes down hard, gasping with one hand pressed to her stomach. "The hell?" Rosslyn pulls back, her fists up in case it's a feint, but Lyme can't even picture feinting right now, not when it feels like her insides have turned to liquid fire. "I didn't even hit you!"

Lyme just shakes her head, and the trainer calls the match. "I don't know what happened," Lyme grits out, but this is the Centre, and in the Centre if it's not broken, you walk it off. "Give me a minute, I'll be fine."

Rosslyn crouches next to her, her hand on Lyme's shoulder, and Lyme would have knocked her away a few years ago but she's lost that reflex and now she doesn't care. Then something in Rosslyn's face changes; her eyes go wide and she glances down, but everything hurts too much and Lyme has missed a step. "Can I take her to the nurse?" Rosslyn asks, and Lyme is about to get mad when the trainer pauses, then says yes with a face that says 'oh'.

Rosslyn walks Lyme there, which is ridiculous. Lyme glares at her; this whole thing is embarrassing. She probably just ate something bad earlier and it's only hitting her now. "You don't actually have to come with me," she grouses. "I'm not even bleeding."

"Yeah, that's the thing," Rosslyn says. "Actually you are."

"What?" Lyme touches her face, checking her nose and mouth, but her fingers come away clean. "Where?" Rosslyn raises her eyebrows, and Lyme's stomach churns in a way that's not because of whatever's happening to her. She stops walking. "No."

"It was gonna happen someday," Rosslyn says, shrugging. "Don't worry about it. You put up with it just this once, you get, like, a week off to lie around and hate everything and eat all the food, and then you'll get pills and never have to worry about it again. Just be glad you weren't on the ropes course or something."

This doesn't sound like much consolation, and Lyme picks up the pace to get to the nurse's office faster even as the cramps get worse.

The nurse is businesslike at least, gives her a brisk talk and some supplies and tells her it's nothing to be ashamed about, and Lyme doesn't know how to tell her that she's not ashamed, she's horrified and scared and betrayed and furious. She's heard the lectures, she's read the pamphlets, she knows everything about it, but Lyme always thought, in the back of her mind, that if she didn't want it enough then it wouldn't happen. Every time the other girls who bragged theirs had started or sighed because theirs hadn't, Lyme would cringe and whisper a prayer that it would never happen to her. That she'd be the exception.

That she wouldn't have yet another piece of proof that her parents were right about her and what her body will do whether she wants it to or not.

The rest of the week, Lyme will be happy to forget. She spends half of it in the shower just so she can sluice off the blood and not have to think about it collecting and congealing and rotting, and even though she knows it's not true she swears she can smell it and everyone else can, too. She doesn't like to leave her room even to go eat because it feels like everyone knows, even though the boys are thirteen and stupid and probably think pads are for soaking up blood from when you get stabbed.

She's happy when it's over and she gets the pills that mean she will never have to deal with this for the rest of her life. Once again it's Capitol magic that lets her have this, the Capitol with their doctors and scientists and people who understand that this isn't a beautiful, natural thing like one of her teachers tried to say once, it's gross and weird and some people never want to think about it. Lyme is happy to serve the Capitol when they keep giving things to her like this; it only seems fair.

* * *

Even better, the Centre separates the boys and the girls. They still practice sparring with each other because they have to - their bodies are built differently, and most boys and girls have separate skill-sets from each other - but for the most part they're kept apart. Anyone caught getting too friendly with the opposite sex gets pulled aside for the harsh reminder that one day they might have to stick a knife in that other person, and the last thing a Career needs is complication.

There are a handful of secret romances, and a few more friendships, between the boys and the girls, but for the most part everyone is too focused. It's fine with Lyme; with all the things her body has been doing to her, the last thing she needs to worry about is keeping boys away. Not that they try, when she's big and scary and there are lots of other, prettier girls to stare at before the trainers catch them and give them a smack.

They are all teenagers in the Program, though, and the trainers aren't stupid. Lyme finds out fast that sex is encouraged just fine in the Centre, as long as it's between the same gender and doesn't interfere with training. She hears it from one of the older girls, who winks at her and says she's had half the girls in her year and it's way more fun than messing around with idiot, sweaty boys.

"Girls smell nicer," she drawls, sprawled out on the couch in the common room with lazy confidence. Her foot presses against Lyme's thigh, an imposition that Lyme would've gut-punched a boy for. "I dunno, there's tons of reasons. Maybe once I'm out I'll try boys again, but for now I don't miss it."

Lyme feels like her head just got stuffed with expanding rice; she's never heard of this before, not with Mom and Pa and everyone telling her one day she'd grow up and marry a boy just like that. No one told her she could be with girls instead. This is the sort of thing they should teach in school, never mind all the dumb stuff about how to have babies and all the diseases you can catch if you try.

The other girl - her name is Astra - gives Lyme a wink, then her grin sharpens. "It's not for everybody, but most people at least have a phase here. Did you want to try?"

Lyme tries. It's - well, it's weird. It's weird, and things are squishy, and there's just so much _girl_, everywhere, she can't get away from it, and it's like all the strange parts about doing things by herself only multiplied. Afterward she's furious, though Astra doesn't seem offended, just sits back and leans her hands against the floor while Lyme throws spear after spear into the dummy across the room.

"It's okay," Astra says after a while. "Not everybody likes it. It's not a big deal. A few years here and you can have all the boys you want."

"I don't want boys," Lyme grits out, and her eyes sting and she blinks hard and nearly wrenches her shoulder out on the next throw.

Because the thing is, she does. She's seen them, pretty boys with their lean muscles and cocky grins, and she wants to shove them into walls and make them stop grinning. She wants to dig her fingers into their forearms and pull their hair until they hiss and make them beg like Pa used to say all good girls do in the end.

But that's not how it works. Girls don't get to do that, not with boys, and Lyme wants to like girls, she wants it so hard that she tries it a few more times with different girls, but it's disappointing and awkward and strange every time. Lyme can't fist her hand in a girl's hair and yank it, not when a boy would do the same to her if he had the chance, and it doesn't take long before she gives up entirely.

It's not like there isn't enough for Lyme to do anyway. She'll get over it. Whenever she notices the slide of sweat down a boy's neck and imagines scraping her teeth against his throat, Lyme throws herself into training even harder. Her sword-work improves at such a drastic rate that a trainer asks her if she's been sneaking out at night to practice.

"Nope," Lyme says with a grim smile. "Just motivated."

* * *

Residential is harder, meaner, and there's less time for fooling around or bullshit, though of course there is a lot of that. The training kicks up, and the trainers stop pretending they're there for anything other than to teach the trainees how to kill. There's no more sports, no more games, it's just training now, and Lyme collapses into bed at the end of the day with aching muscles and no desire to do, well, anything. She's seen some of the older kids messing around after free time, the hour before dinner and the two hours before lights out, and she has no idea how they have the energy to do it.

Except that near the end of her first year, when the chime rings that announces the end of the afternoon session, Lyme doesn't feel like going back to her room and crashing for an hour. They were practicing ranged weapons, and she dislikes range because she's better up close, and she's itching to spar or move or get her hands around someone's throat.

She's looking around the common room, fingers twitching at her sides, when one of the girls in her year gives her a nudge. "Hey, can you show me that throw you do with your shoulder, you know, the one you beat Cameron with?" the girl asks Lyme. "I watched you do it but I can't get it right."

"Sure," Lyme says. It's not about size, because no matter how big she is there will always be someone bigger; it's about speed, and leverage, and even a girl half her size could do it right if she learned. "We'll need more floor space, though."

One of the new thirteens is passed out on the couch, head tipped back, snoring like the chainsaw of a lumberjack from Seven in the middle of a forest, and Lyme rolls her eyes. "Newbies," she snickers on her way past.


	3. Chapter 3: Volunteer

There are invisible lines between all the kids in Residential, dividing them into groups of who's done what and who hasn't, who's in the top of their class versus who's scraping by at the bottom having just barely made the cut, but the biggest, starkest line is the one dividing the fourteen-year-olds from the ones below.

Fourteen is the one that matters. Fifteen is when those who are left take their Field Exams, a three-week mock Arena that half of them fail because they're meant to, because it's designed to test and push and bend and break the trainees, and the ones who make it out are quieter, thinner, and at the same time more confident because odds are they'll be going in.

But fourteen is the big one. Fourteen is the first real divider, the first test of a trainee's mettle, and nobody talks about the results except the trainers, except some of the kids in hushed, almost furtive whispers. This isn't like the first broken bone when they're seven or the first time they got hit with a weapon so bad they had to go to Medical. This is the one that matters.

Fourteen is the first human kill test.

Most trainees only talk about one or two details if they're pressed, and it's understood that you don't ask, you don't talk about it. "He cried," one of them will say, wincing. "She begged me not to." "He ran at me so fast I almost didn't have to do anything, just hold the knife and aim it." "He vomited on my shoes."

The ones who've done it band together, not against the ones who haven't, it's not a conscious thing, but as Lyme's fourteenth birthday creeps closer - and that's what birthdays are, now, countdowns, countdowns to more tests and newer challenges and finally, the Arena - she notices how certain kids peel off from their groups and form new ones, silent and hunched and huddled in one corner of the cafeteria.

They're not supposed to let the others' tests affect them, not supposed to pay much attention at all, but Lyme thinks that must just be official speak because how can she not notice when her regular sparring partner disappears one afternoon and comes back the next day, just to sit in the weight room, hogging one of the benches and staring at her hands? They do that a lot, Lyme notices, sitting with their hands out and open in front of them, palms up and fingers curled.

They don't tell you when it will be, but it's always within a month of turning fourteen. The day Lyme's birthday hits starts the official clock, and from then on every day she hardly takes a full breath. She practices as hard as she can whenever she has a minute, and they probably aren't going to give her a knife - sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, sometimes they let the trainee choose - and so she works at killing strokes, tackling the dummies and tearing at them with her hands, watching for the flash of light that tells her she's made a fatal strike. She learns how to twist necks and jab her fingers into vital areas, how long to keep a chokehold until her opponent is dead, not just unconscious.

Fifteen days after her birthday, two trainers come up to her at breakfast and tell her it's time to go. Lyme doesn't say anything - you're not supposed to say anything - and she lets them take her to a hovercraft. This is the first, which means it's just about the killing, not the showmanship; later on they'll take her to the Centre stylists, have them work with makeup and hair, and she'll need to pay attention to the cameras and what looks good and what doesn't, but this is just about the kill. This is about watching what she does when she's taken her first life.

Two trainees dropped out last week, one boy and one girl. Both of them came back shaking, and the boy made it to the end of his recovery week before he picked up a sword in training and threw up all over himself. They found the girl in a corner, curled up into a ball and tearing at her hair as it came out in clumps, her scalp and fingers stained red.

That won't be Lyme. She's come too far for this. The human targets are criminals, condemned to execution, and District Two has the best Peacekeepers and most rigorous justice system in all of Panem, which means every person they send to die deserves to be there. In a way it's easier than the Arena, no kids here. Only adults.

It doesn't stop Lyme from wishing she'd found a way to skip breakfast as the hovercraft hums through the air, but the Centre monitors everyone's caloric intake and they wouldn't let her even if she wanted to. The protein pancakes sit heavy in her stomach and she tries not to think about them.

They drop her in the woods and the hovercraft lifts back up into the sky. Lyme doesn't bother watching it as it disappears; whether it flies out of range or stays, invisible, above her, it doesn't matter. It won't come back until either she or the target stop breathing. May as well forget it's there.

Kids do die on their kill tests. Not many, and the trainers don't tell them to add to the mystery on purpose, but there are rumours. There are always rumours. Lyme won't let it be her.

She walks through the undergrowth, taking soft, measured steps. She's big, the biggest girl in her year and for two years above her, but she knows how to move silently; anyone as big as she does needs to know stealth. The target won't be bothering with that; they'll have been told they're pardoned if they can kill her. A lot of prisoners volunteer for the chance, since they're dead anyway. Why not? If Lyme were sentenced to death she'd want to fight her way out, too.

A branch cracks under her boot - she winces, wipes her hands on her pant leg and tries to centre herself - and then she hears it, the crashing and loud rustle of someone running through the trail and not caring who's around to overhear. Lyme stops moving forward, stepping back and angling herself against the nearest tree. If she'd been smart she would have climbed one and dropped onto the target from above, but then again, without a weapon she'd have to rely on the proper angle as she fell. It's better this way.

It's a man, big and strong and built for work, and he jars loose all the memories of Pa that Lyme has done her best to lock away. For a second she's frozen as he comes out of the trees, the same desperate cruelty on his face, but then she digs her nails into her palms and she's back again.

"Well ain't you a disappointment," he says, stopping well away, and Lyme narrows her eyes. They gave him a knife but not her, and that's a clear a sign of any: she's meant to take it from him. The way he's tossing it in his hand, flipping it end over end in the air and catching it by the handle, means it shouldn't be too hard. He's careless. Arrogant. "Look at you, no tits on you. Though I guess you're a girl down below no matter what, so it's all the same to me."

Lyme's stomach gives a jolt, and the rage fills her like someone's standing above her with a kettle of it, pouring it straight into her veins. She lets out a long breath, curls and uncurls her fists to give him something to look at while she alters her stance, prepares to charge him. "What are you in for?" she asks, keeping it conversational and arrogant.

He sneers at her, gives her a long once-over. "You'll see soon enough. No penalty, they said. Whatever happens here, I get to leave, free as a bird. Shame you ain't one of the pretty ones, but I'll make you pretty in the end, don't you worry."

Everything turns white. Lyme breaks for him; he's big and fast for his size but she's faster, and he might have practice but he's not used to a girl trained the way Lyme is. He gets her with the knife once but either he's playing or the Centre has taught her well because she just keeps going, ignoring the brief flare of fire across her ribs. She's had worse. The women who are the reason he's here have had infinitely more.

She thinks of the women in the back of her mind, the part not relegated to gauging the fight, and she wonders if they were young, or old, if he only picked the pretty ones or grabbed whoever he could. If he liked it when they screamed. If he made them false promises, told them if they did what he told them to do he'd let them go.

Lyme forgets they're watching, forgets even to care. She grapples and fights, uses his weight and assurance against him, and finally his wrist snaps under her grip and the knife falls to the ground. Lyme scoops it up with her foot and picks it up halfway through the air, and finally, finally his face changes. The colour drains from his skin. He wets his lips, holds his broken wrist against his chest.

"You gotta be kidding," he wheezes out, his throat raw from where she sent a punch straight to his windpipe.

Lyme doesn't give him the chance to regroup; she attacks, and soon he's on his back, his arms trapped under her, and he thrashes and shouts and curses - he even works up a mouthful of saliva and spits it right in her face - but Lyme isn't going to let that stop her.

She has him now, like all the times she wanted to grab a kitchen knife and send it right into Pa's gut. A thousand words press up against her brain, fighting and surging to be set free, and the temperature must have risen because her vision is swimming but she blinks hard and it clears.

For a second Lyme sees herself carving him to pieces, pulling his insides out in a long tumble of pink and grey, trying to keep him alive as she guts him like some of the bigger kids from the backwoods talked about hunting, the ones who got sent home because they were too mean and the Centre wants kids they can control. She imagines taunting him with his own dick, shoving it down his throat and forcing him to swallow it.

She stops. She's breathing hard and her face is wet and the man below her is terrified - she feels it between them, the warm, wetness as he pisses himself - and as she looks at his wide, bloodshot eyes, Lyme feels the calm creep through her, chasing away the mindless rage. She's not a monster; he is.

"This is for them," Lyme tells him, and slits his throat.

She staggers back as he twitches and gurgles and scrabbles at his neck - it takes longer than she thought, and she stands over him with the knife ready in case she has to make another strike - but just when she's contemplating going back in to finish him off, the man stiffens, lets out a terrifying rattle, thrashes, and goes still.

Lyme drops the knife. "Son of a bitch," she mutters, scrubbing the blood off her hands against her uniform as the whine of the hovercraft sounds above her. The wind kicks up, whipping leaves into a frenzy, and she presses her palms over her eyes. "Son of a bitch!"

The Centre has to know about Pa; they know everything, and if nothing else the trainers aren't stupid, and they'll know why she showed up with bruises and broken bones that weren't put there by the other kids. They know, and they gave her a man just like him for her kill test, so she could finally, finally chase the last of her demons away.

It's a good thing Lyme isn't keeping track of the things she owes the Centre - no point, she owes them everything and they own her anyway, it's easier just to make it a big round number like infinity - because this alone would have pushed her over the edge into something she'll never repay. Except there is a way to repay them - only one, the one way that matters for people like her, and Lyme is determined more than ever to see it through.

* * *

Lyme is determined not to sit in shocked silence, staring at her hands, like the others. He deserved it, the man she killed; it's no different that it was her than the executioner, except she finally got to kill some of her own demons. It's not murder. It's justice. He _deserved_ it.

Still. The cafeteria runs out of salt or something the next day, because everything Lyme eats is dry and tasteless, and none of it wants to digest. She wanders into the weapons room, looks around, then turns and heads back out without touching anything. She sits in the common room for an hour watching the television, only to blink when one of the older kids comes in, gives her a weird look, and flicks it on.

She stares at the bracelet on her wrist, the three orange beads, dull and old from so many showers, next to the bright, shiny red one. Lyme sits with her elbow against the tabletop, her hand at eye level, and she turns her arm so the light catches the bead and sends its reflection bouncing over the walls.

"You okay?" Astra asks her, sitting down in the chair next to her.

Lyme jumps. "He deserved it," she bursts out before she can stop herself, before she's even aware that she spoke, and after she clamps her mouth shut, ears growing hot. She drops her hand and crosses her arms, sticking the bracelet in her armpit.

"Keep telling yourself that," Astra says, only it's not sarcastic, it's serious, and her grey eyes are dark with an understanding Lyme has never seen before but feels deep in her gut. "It'll get easier. Just remember they'd be dead anyway."

She's not just talking about the criminals, but Lyme says "He deserved it," again, almost pleading. Her hands shake, fingers pressed against her ribs.

Astra gives her a small smile, punches her in the arm, and slips out, leaving Lyme alone with her thoughts and the strips of leather and bits of glass around her wrist.

Lyme says it one more time to the empty air. She doesn't know who she's trying to convince anymore - but at least she wasn't staring at her hands. That's something.

* * *

Her next test comes in the middle of winter, and this time they give her a woman, terrified and gasping in the frigid air. She'll have done something to deserve being here the same as the man before, but Lyme's guts twist anyway as she looks at the woman's wide-eyed face.

"Please don't kill me," the woman sobs. "Please don't. It was all a mistake."

Lyme rears back. They gave her a knife at the start this time, and she clutches it tight in her frozen fingers. Of course there's no mistake, she reminds herself. There's never any mistakes, not in District Two. It's just fear and desperation and the certainty of death talking; looking the end in the face makes liars of everyone.

Don't look her in the eye. Don't allow a connection. She's not a woman, she's a target, and it doesn't matter who a target was before they came here, in the Arena that's all they are. If it were a man Lyme would have struck already. She wants to close her eyes, give herself a second, but she can't. They're watching.

There's no time to make it okay in her head, no time to think up a justification to fix it. There will be even less time in the Arena, where half the time thinking makes you dead; by the time you finish thinking, the thing you're thinking about has already happened, and likely as not that's your blood all over the grass.

The bottom line is that this is what Lyme's here to do. There can't be anything deeper than that. This is what the Centre wants, and the Centre has given her everything. Lyme steadies her grip on the knife and lunges.

After she hobbles back, and her stomach heaves and she tastes her lunch at the back of her throat but no, they're watching, and she swallows it down, ignoring the bitter taste of bile and the burning in her throat. Lyme sucks in lungfuls of air through her nose and exhales through her mouth, going through the calming techniques the trainers taught her, and soon the nausea passes.

The blood is a bright, bright red splashed across the snow. The cameras will like that, Lyme thinks.

* * *

It gets easier after that. Much easier; Lyme hits another growth spurt the following spring, and the Centre dieticians up her protein intake until she's drinking shakes alongside every meal and one in the middle of the afternoon. If she's still here at sixteen - and of course she will be - they'll put her on steroids, not as much as the boys because the Capitol doesn't like their women to look too masculine, but enough that she can keep building muscle mass without having to choke down more food than her body wants to digest.

Lyme's entire life whittles down to training. If she's not working on weapons - she sticks mostly to swords, but she's also wicked with a mace and can throw a spear almost as well as Brutus, though she doesn't feel the same connection to them - then she's running, or lifting weights, or working her shoulders on the parallel bars.

She doesn't make many friends, but it's better not to make friends in the Centre anyway when the majority of her classmates disappear every time there's a round of cuts. Lyme trains, she spars with the others, she talks smack, and she does her best to beat everyone she can.

Once she sneaks into head office and goes through the file, and Lyme grins in the darkness when she sees that they've put her at the head of her year, and looking at the raw scores she's even beating the boys. Not that it matters; she's not competing against them for a spot on the Volunteer stage, so it's best not to think about that until the time comes, but it still gives her a jolt of satisfaction.

Even more than the boys, though, Lyme now feels an ugly pride in beating the other girls in her year, the ones who are prettier, more feminine, the ones the Centre usually picks and the Capitol goes crazy over. Lyme's looks will always be a hindrance - she can manage striking, but she will never, ever be beautiful - and knowing she's beating them anyhow is better than being allowed to sleep in or get an extra piece of fruit for dessert.

She knows they know she did it the next day, when during morning training they pull her out of her group. "You've gotten cocky," they tell her, and Lyme folds her arms and tries to ignore the others watching. This is a show; whatever they're doing, it's meant to make an example, and it's never, ever good to be the one they're making an example out of. "Time to show us how much you can back it up."

Lyme's eye twitches as she fights not to narrow it, and she stands with her hands at her side, forcing an easiness she doesn't feel into her stance. And then the trainer calls over one of the Seniors, and Lyme has to bite the inside of her lip to stop herself from sucking in a breath, because it's this year's Volunteer.

Not for certain - she's seventeen, angling hard to be put in a year early, and there's always the girl above her as backup, but rumours travel faster than throwing knives in Residential and Lyme has heard this one for months - but unless she's injured or killed, likely as not she'll be the one in the Arena this summer. She is beautiful, the most beautiful trainee Lyme has ever seen, but with a smile that hides pain and blood and knives behind it, and a twisting hatred starts up in Lyme's gut. This one will probably get together with Brutus and make beautiful Career babies if she wins.

The trainer leans in and says something to the other girl, quiet enough that Lyme isn't meant to hear, but years of straining to hear her parents' voices to judge their moods and whether it's safe to come out of her room has given her an edge. She hears the trainer say, "Take her down a peg," and the indignation burns in her veins like acid.

They fight, and from the beginning Lyme knows she's lost, because she's angry - furious, the rage coiled in her muscles and making her blows erratic - and the other girl is calm, focused, and secure in her position. As long as she doesn't get herself beheaded she's a sure thing for Volunteer, whereas Lyme still has four more years of scrapping and killing and proving herself.

It's worse because the girl is playing with her. Lyme fights as hard as she can - no point in holding back even though she knows she should try to save a bit of dignity - but she's still losing, and each hold is a second too long, each blow a little harder than necessary. The girl is making an example of Lyme like she's a trainer bringing down an uppity newbie, with everyone watching.

If that weren't bad enough, it's not just a pinning match; the girl is in the running for Volunteer, and that means she fights hard and nasty; soon enough Lyme's choking on her own blood, and she knows without having to check that she'll be going to the infirmary to get her nose set later. Finally Lyme is on her back, shoulders pressed hard enough to the mats that her back aches, and the girl sits above her, expression nonchalant, not even breathing hard.

She shouldn't do it. She should take the loss in good spirit because showmanship is almost as important as winning, but as Lyme struggles to breathe through the blood in her throat and the misplaced bones in her nose, looking up through swollen cheekbones at the picture-perfect girl above her, something snaps. The girl sits back and offers Lyme a hand up, and Lyme sucks in a breath and spits a mouthful of blood and saliva right in her face.

If nothing else, Lyme will cherish the wide-eyed look of shock that crosses the girl's pretty face until the day she dies.

"Lyme," calls out a trainer, and that's a flat disappointed voice and she knows she deserved it. "Suck it up. You're a trainee, not a first grader."

The girl stands without offering to help again, and she laughs - the sound digs into Lyme's bones like a rusty blade - and swipes her fingers across her cheekbones, turning Lyme's insult into a smear of war paint. "Good match," she says and winks.

Lyme hauls herself to her feet and wipes her mouth. Again she should be quiet, again she should return the gesture and shake hands, but she's humiliated now. "Pretty-ass bitch," she spits out.

The girl snorts. "This pretty-ass bitch just kicked yours," she says, and tosses Lyme a jaunty wave. "Try harder next time."

They fix her nose and make her suck on ice chips to soothe her bruised throat in the infirmary, and Lyme never stays there a second longer than she absolutely has to but she does today, curled up at the end of the bed with her head resting on her knees. She'd rather stick her hand into a vat of acid than do that again, feel the whole room laughing at her, and know that if this were in the Arena the Capitol would be glad that someone who was beautiful enough to be there put the homely challenger in her place.

Valeria, Lyme's favourite trainer, comes to find her when she doesn't go back out. "You know why we had to do that," she says, and none of the trainers are soft but some of them pull their punches a little. "You can't be thinking you're better than the other girls just because you're bigger and stronger. You try that in the Arena and the girl from One is likely to put a knife in your eye."

Lyme shrugs and doesn't look up.

"She's also three years older than you," Valeria points out. "That's something that will never happen in the Arena, so why don't you stop your crying and come back out like the trainee you are instead of the baby you're not."

Lyme grimaces. "It's just - girls already have to try twice as hard as the guys if we want to be taken seriously. At least the ones who are pretty have that going for them. Me, they'll write me off because I'm not. I have to be the best."

"So be the best," Valeria says. "Just don't get complacent. That's where you went wrong."

Lyme sighs and pokes at her nose, using the twinge of pain to ground her. "Yes sir."

"Good." Valeria leans over and claps her shoulder. "Up. Do some laps, hit the range, then come back in for dinner."

* * *

That summer, the 51st Hunger Games goes to District Two. Lyme watches with the rest of the trainees in the Centre, analyzing every detail, and at the end even Lyme has to admit the girl played a solid game. Lyme grunts with reluctant approval when she slices off another tribute's head with a loop of wire, and she only rolls her eyes a little at all the flirting because she knows that's part of the package for the pretty girls. If nothing else, Lyme won't have to do that; her role will be to intimidate and antagonize the boys, not wink at them.

The girl finishes with eight kills. Lyme knows she shouldn't, but she vows to beat that when it's her turn.

* * *

At fifteen they start image training, and for the first time Lyme hits a snag. She doesn't know how to make friends, how to charm people, and the trainers pull her aside and tell her she'll have to step up, because fighting is only part of winning the Games. She has to win over the sponsors, the Gamemakers, the audience, the interviewers; has to convince them that she's a good investment.

They abandon 'pretty' right away, though they do try it just to be sure. Lyme grits her teeth and stands still as they wax and polish her body, weave extensions into her hair and apply makeup to her face; obediently steps into the silver gown they hand her even though she wants to tear it to pieces with her fingernails. It all feels wrong, but she stands the way they tell her, hip cocked and hand at her side, and tries to match the coy smile the image trainer shows her.

"All right," the trainer says finally, and she's trying not to laugh but it's there in the tightness at the corners of her mouth. "That's enough of that."

Because Lyme is playing the perfect fashion doll like all Twos have to do, she doesn't say 'Thank Snow' out loud, but she certainly thinks it.

After that they dress her in suits, style her short hair up in military spikes, and paint the curves of her biceps with shadows to make them stand out. When Lyme looks at herself in the mirror she sees a warrior, and she's still not beautiful but she is unforgettable, and her breath catches in her throat.

"Yes," the trainer says, mostly to herself. "We can work with that, I think."

They keep experimenting after that, less to find her image and more to get Lyme used to the pawing and invasion of privacy. She learns not to flinch when ordered to strip in front of a room full of strangers, learns how to stand naked and have people circle her like vultures, zeroing in on every flaw and putting their hands places she would never allow in real life.

She's a model trainee until the first time a male attendant touches her, and then Lyme recoils so fast she doesn't even realize she's done it until she notices the circle of trainers has broken. The head of the group raises her eyebrows, and Lyme bites back a curse, wincing. She tries for calm - there will be male stylists, and half the prep team will likely be male - but she can't. It takes all her willpower not to hiss like an angry cat and pull away again. Finally they tell her to put her clothes back on and they'll try again another day.

Lyme heads for the showers, turns the water as hot as she can stand, and scrubs herself until her skin is raw and her sides bleed.

That evening, a trainer stops by her room just before lights-out. Lyme is on the floor doing pushups with her feet braced above her on the bed, and she stops in the raised position, arms trembling. The trainer looks down at her, and Lyme says nothing, waiting.

"Two takes care of its own. We've put a note in your file," she says, and Lyme's eyes widen. "No male stylists. Consider this your one privilege."

"Yes sir," Lyme says, not trusting her voice to say anything else without shaking. Once she's alone Lyme gives herself a minute to be overwhelmed with gratitude, and she sits on her bed with her knuckles pressed to her eyes, unable to believe any of it, that once again the Centre has done more for her than anyone else in her entire life.

* * *

A hair under a month after her fifteenth birthday, they haul her out of bed in the middle of the night and drag her to a big white room in the depths of the complex. They strip her down, dress her in an olive jumpsuit and do the bare minimum of makeup, just enough that she knows she has to look good for the cameras. Lyme's never had to wear makeup for a kill test before, and it's not until she's in the hovercraft and one of the silent Peacekeepers steps forward with a syringe gun the size of her forearm that it hits her. The tracker slides into her skin as the realization creeps through her brain.

It's not a kill test at all; it's her Field Exam, a three-week mock Arena with everything the Centre's Gamemaker-imitators can throw at her, from environmental hazards to muttations to artificial tribute analogues, to see if they can break her. If she walks out at the end, she's on the fast track to Volunteering; if not, well, she won't have to worry about what that means anymore.

If no one talks about the kill test they definitely don't talk about the Field Exam, and almost all the trainees who pass get brought back pale and thin and covered in blood to spend the next week hooked up to machines in the infirmary. Lyme's heart pounds and she tries to slow it, because the trainers back in the Centre will be looking at screens with her vitals on the monitor and they'll be able to tell she's scared.

Not scared, Lyme tells herself as her breath sticks in her chest. Excited. Anticipating. She digs her fingers into the armrests and counts out four seconds between inhaling and exhaling. It's not real. It's just a test. It's not real.

Except it is real. They drop her down at the edge of a bluff, and as soon as the hovercraft disappears the wind picks up strong enough it nearly knocks her over the edge. Thunder cracks overhead and the sky opens up as though someone turned on a giant shower above her. Lyme crouches down, flattens herself against the ground and inches her way back across the crumbling cliff face to safety while the rain fills her ears and nose and she spits it out just so she can get enough air to breathe.

It is real, at least in the way it matters. This might not be the Arena but if she loses she's out all the same, and she might not be dead but she will be thrown out, and that's as good as because what else is she going to do? Pa used to tell Mom she had nowhere else to go and Lyme was no better, and he might have been wrong about Lyme then but it is true now. She can't see herself as a trainer or a Peacekeeper or any of the other jobs that Centre washouts take; if she doesn't make it as a tribute then she might as well rip out her heart and throw it on the ground for the ants to carry back to their nest.

The rain pours down in sheets, and as she stumbles through the trees Lyme nearly runs into the artificial target with a '5' painted on its chest. There are twenty-two others hidden inside the square of land they've roped her off in, and she has twenty-one days to kill them all. They won't take each other out or starve to death like in the Arena; it's up to her or nothing. She has no weapons yet, and for a terrified second as she stares at the automaton's blank face, Lyme's staggers in the face of the enormous task in front of her.

But then the target moves, lunging clumsily at her, and her boots skid on the wet leaves and mud and if it hits her in the wrong place she's dead in every way that matters, and she wrenches a branch from a low-hanging limb and drives it into the target's face. She keeps going until it falls, and once it's on the ground she stomps on its head until the gears give beneath her foot and the blue light on its chest winks out, letting her know it's dead.

The rain lets up. Lyme wipes the water from her face, runs her fingers through her hair, and lets out a shaky breath. The Games are on.

Part of the game is giving the cameras something to work with, but in the Arena they can't mention the Centre because they have to pretend, absurdly, that they just picked this all up in their time at the Games Complex. Lyme could think up a whole new backstory for herself but her brain goes blank, and as she digs in looking for inspiration her mind gives her a picture of Pa's face, sneering and disbelieving.

He'd sputter to see her like this, filthy and covered in mud and blood like a savage, and Mom would probably have a heart attack. Lyme starts laughing, and she's up in a tree with a makeshift snare in her hands, waiting for anyone to come close, and she leans back until the bark digs into the space between her shoulder blades and snickers into her hand.

"Not a lady now, am I," Lyme says aloud, swiping a hand over her forehead even though it just smears the dirt around instead of getting rid of it. "Are you disappointed? You always said I'd grow up to be like all the other girls. Well I showed you, didn't I."

She takes out the next target with a blow to the crotch, and she starts laughing when it falls. "That's for you, Pa," Lyme says, and she has a knife now and she sticks it where the target's dick would be if it had one. "That's for you and everyone like you."

Later on after she kills another, she dips her fingers in the mess of blood (motor oil, part of her brain reminds her, but it may as well be blood and so it is) and smears it across her face. "Oh, look at that," Lyme says, laughing again, the sound high and full of broken razor blades. She's lost track of the days. "I've got blood all over me. Do I have to hand in my 'good little girl' card? Or do they make exceptions for the ones who look like men?" She snickers and rubs her fingers together, feeling the liquid grow tacky against her fingertips. "What do you think, Mom?"

She takes another one out with a mace to the face. She has a mace now, and a sword, and she stalks through the Arena, looking for the remaining tributes. This one has a 1 on its chest and an F on its sleeve, and Lyme grins savagely as the face collapses beneath the weight of her blow. "Not so pretty now," she says. "I heard you laughing at me. I know what you're thinking, you and your friends, but guess what. You don't have to be pretty to win." She yanks the mace free and stands over the body, her feet planted firmly on either side of its shoulders. "Being pretty didn't help you, now did it?"

Lyme has no idea how long she's in the Arena. The faint voice of reason in the back of her brain tells her three weeks is the limit but it feels like longer - three weeks isn't that long, she shouldn't be this out of it after a mere twenty-one days - and she can't remember where she is or what she's doing. She just knows that the last target feels softer than the ones before, her sword burying itself deeper, and she doesn't remember the others screaming or the insides feeling so hot and wet under her hands. It doesn't matter. All that matters is another down, and Lyme carves another notch in her forearm with her arm to mark the kill and the bite of pain brings her out of it enough to remember.

Right. She's been doing that, left arm for the days, right for the kills. The ones at the top at her wrist are scabbed over and itchy, the ones closer to her shoulder fresh and swollen. Lyme runs her fingers down the tallies and counts: twenty-one days one one arm, twenty-three kills on the other.

That's it. She's won. She drops her sword and presses shaking hands to her face and laughs - laughs and laughs and laughs - and then the voice comes over an invisible speaker and tells her to wait for the hovercraft.

She's won. It's over. Except then the hovercraft takes her back to a big white building that Lyme remembers, and faces peek around the corner as they drag her toward medical and oh no it isn't over, is it, and winning means that one day she'll have to do this all over again for real.

Lyme turns her face into the pillow and takes short, gasping breaths as the sedatives hit her and drag her down. When she wakes there's a bowl of ice cream by the bed and a silver bead on her wrist.

* * *

Lyme is barely eighteen when she stands in the main hall of the Centre with the head trainer, the head of the Program, and the Capitol envoy and vows to bring honour and glory to her district, the Capitol, and Panem with her last breath. She takes the knife from the head trainer and slices a long line across her palm with a sure, even stroke, makes a fist and lets the blood drip between her fingers to the floor as a mark of her sacrifice.

The head of the Program undoes the clasp of her bracelet - the only time it ever leaves her skin is during these ceremonies - and Lyme waits, arm extended, as they slide the final gold bead over the strands, then affix it back around her wrist. It's only a small bit of glass with a thin layer of paint, but it feels heavy, dragging her arm down, and Lyme's chest flutters but she doesn't waver as she looks the trainer in the eye and repeats the final phrases of her vow.

And just like that, it's done, and there's nothing for her to do but keep up the training, take her bulk-up medication, and drink as many protein shakes as she can choke down to build her weight before the Reaping Day. That night Lyme doesn't sleep, just sits on her bed and turns her wrist over, back and forth, back and forth, watching the light from her desk lamp hit the beads and scatter reflections over her walls.

* * *

A week before the Games, Lyme gets a piece of paper with her mentor's name on it. They're not likely to give her either of the girls who won in the years before her - it's too soon for that - and Brutus has a new victor so it won't be him, thank Snow, but that still leaves Callista or Hera or any of the ones who won in the decades previous. Lyme unfolds the paper, skims the preamble and searches for the name, only to stop and draw in a breath sharp enough it hurts.

They gave her Nero, a man, and not just a man but one who's a good thirteen years older than she is so there's no hope of them becoming equals later. They gave her a man with age and authority to flaunt, and if she wins she'll be expected to kowtow to him for the rest of her life because that's how mentoring works.

Lyme balls up the paper and throws it at the wall, furious when it sails lightly through the air and bounces harmlessly off the concrete. She spent years trying to escape her father's control on her, and now they've gone and traded him for a mentor who'll do exactly the same. It's worse because Nero hasn't even brought home a tribute; his scores are some of the best in the business, his kids always make the Final Six, and most of them the Final Four, but that doesn't actually matter outside the mentor high-five camp because they end up dead anyhow.

The ugly thought crawls into her head that they're writing her off this year, giving her a mentor she won't bond with who likely isn't going to bring her home, but that's the kind of thing she definitely isn't allowed to be thinking, and years of Centre training let her push it back. Lyme slides off her bed and does pushups until her arms burn and she can't physically raise herself off the ground anymore, and then she lies there with her face pressed to the cool metal floor.

It doesn't matter. After everything she's done, everything she's dragged herself through by her own fingernails and nothing else, Lyme can still do this. She will. There's nothing wrong with doubt but in the Centre it doesn't last long, and she lets it boil off her like standing water on a blistering day.

If nothing else, Two doesn't give tributes to mentors who don't want them, who don't think they can make a connection. That means Nero would have asked, would have put his name in for her, and even if that makes no sense, it's got to mean something. It's just that Lyme has no idea what that reason might be.

It takes her a long time to fall asleep that night, and before she does she gets up, picks up the crumpled paper and smoothes it out, laying it flat on her desk. Trust the Centre, they always tell the trainees, and Lyme has a decade of experience with the Centre fulfilling all its promises and beyond. She should trust them; she _does_ trust them. Lyme lets out a breath and tries not to wonder why none of the female mentors wanted her.

* * *

Her district parter's name is Dale. Lyme stands a full three inches taller and fifteen pounds heavier. He's pretty where Lyme is striking but they're both solid and fierce, and their escort titters about them being a reverse matched set as she feels Lyme's bicep and gushes about Dale's classic bone structure. Lyme wants to roll her eyes but she can't, just raises her chin and looks out at the crowd, and does her best not to think about the Capitol audience who will be clucking her tongues that they're not getting a raving beauty this year like usual.

The crowd, at least, doesn't seem to care; the roaring in front of the stage fills Lyme's ears and runs through her veins and buoys her up, and they chant her name the same as any other year. She stands tall and straight, and it's Dale who makes the first gesture, reaching out to her so they can link hands and raise their arms above their heads in the traditional salute. It feels like a minor victory in itself, and Lyme tries not to laugh when she has to bend her arm to avoid stretching his.

The people in front of the stage go crazy, screaming and cheering, and they're crazy for _her_, with or without a mentor, and Lyme ignores the shadow behind her and bares her teeth in a savage grin.

* * *

No one comes to see her in the Justice Building. Lyme stands in the plain, wood-panelled room for over an hour, hands clasped behind her back, and she stares at the door and thinks about the train ride ahead of her and it's good nobody comes. It means her transformation worked, that no one from her old life looked at the warrior on stage today and saw the little girl with the pigtails and the scabby knees and ripped skirts.

She's glad. Most Careers don't get any visitors, at least so says the rumour mill, and for the ones who do it's never any good. Rumour has it that Odin had to put a restraining order against his last victor's parents after they kept showing up, demanding to get credit for giving her to the Centre - and that's one of the better stories. Most of the others show up to look their little monsters in the face to see for themselves if it's true. It's a distraction Lyme doesn't need and is happy not to have.

Something tickles the back of her mind as she traces the grain of wood down the wall with her eyes, following it until it disappears behind a tall, straight-backed chair, a woman - teacher, maybe, in Lyme's head she's much taller and older - who, Lyme thinks, would not have screamed at her and called her names. The memory is old, faded after years in the Centre and nothing but the Games and training packing her brain, but it's just enough for Lyme to register the curl of disappointment in her stomach.

She shakes it back. Nerves, that's all; that's probably why they make the tributes wait so long, to see what they do when there's no distraction, nothing to keep them from their thoughts. Lyme clasps her left wrist in her right hand and digs her nails in, and she goes to the start of the death list and begins the mental tally. District Eight, female: mauled by dog muttation. District Five, male and District Six, female: tracker jacker stings. District Three, male: struck by lightning ...

Lyme makes it halfway through the sixteenth, the first win by a District Two Career (_District Eight, male: mace to the head_) when the door opens and a masked Peacekeeper tells her it's time to board the train.

It's better this way. Lyme straightens her shoulders to banish the trickle of sweat crawling down her spine, and she might not have anyone in that tiny room to wish her well but she has an entire crowd screaming for her as she stands on the platform, and that is better. Much, much better.

She doesn't look back.

* * *

The Capitol is a whirl and a blur of glitter and painted faces and food, and even if Lyme didn't want Nero as her mentor she's glad to have one at her back, if nothing else. He's there, silent and commanding, when the Remake crew poke at Lyme's crooked, broken nose and contemplate fixing it, giving it an aristocratic arch. "No," Nero says, arms crossed, and Lyme lets out the breath she'd been holding. The makeovers between the Reaping and the Tribute Parade are important, but she never thought they'd go that far.

Her stylist, Priscilla, narrows her eyes and gives her a long once over, taking in her broad shoulders and flat hips. "It wouldn't take much to add some curves," she says, tapping one jewelled fingertip against her lip. "With a bit of work it would be easy to turn her into an Amazon goddess."

Lyme has just enough time to panic before Nero growls. "What did I tell you?" he rumbles in a voice like the start of an avalanche. "You get her to beauty base zero and that's all you do. Take the scars but don't touch anything else."

Priscilla blows out an exasperated breath. "What do you expect me to do if you won't let me _do_ anything? She's -"

"Perfect," Nero says in a hard, clipped voice that dares Priscilla to say another word, and he uncurls his fists in a gesture that even a vapid Capitol citizen can't miss.

Lyme breaks one of the cardinal rules - don't speak, don't move, don't even blink - to glance at Nero in surprise, eyes wide, but he doesn't acknowledge her, just narrows his eyes and stays where he is until Priscilla hisses and backs down.

He steps in once more, after the prep work is done, when the stylist and prep team circle her like children's drawings of fairies. When they start pulling out lengths of shimmering fabrics he says "No dresses" in a dark, no-nonsense voice that Lyme appreciates down to her gut. He stands firm when Priscilla whines about tradition, and finally they give up and put away the pinks and purples and sequins and grumble about stifled creativity, and at last he leaves them alone.

"You Twos," Priscilla grumbles, picking up some charcoal fabric and eyeing it with distaste. "You make things so _difficult_. When I worked with the Ones, their mentors weren't so prone to interfering."

Lyme flicks her gaze to the door where Nero disappeared but says nothing.

That evening Lyme stands tall and proud in her chariot, dressed as an ancient warrior from the storybooks like Twos always are, and she has war paint splashed across her face and fake scars painted on her arms. It's stupid because Remake took away the real ones, but a tribute's job is to stay quiet and do what they tell you so Lyme says nothing as they trace garish, exaggerated battle wounds over her newly-smoothed skin.

Nero steps close to the side and he doesn't touch her - he hasn't touched her, Lyme realizes with a small jolt, even though on the other side Adessa is adjusting Dale's helm and fixing his stance with a few deft pokes at his side and shoulders - but he looks at her, gaze serious. "Be proud," he tells her. "You have every right to be. Let them see it."

Lyme nods, and she can't figure out what Nero's game is, why a man like him would choose a girl like her if it wasn't to put her in her place, but it's not her job to figure it out and she has other things to focus on so she lets it slide.

Nero puts his hand on the side of the chariot as the District One horses pull out, and Lyme glances down. "They're here to see you," he tells her, and of course they are, but that's not what he means. "Forget the other tributes. They're here to see _you_. Knock 'em dead."

"Yes sir," Lyme says without thinking, and she turns back to the square, at the audience that's shouting so loud it sounds like thunder and wordless screams, and she lets herself believe it.

* * *

The next morning when Lyme comes out for breakfast, already dressed, Nero is waiting for her. "Dale's not the pack leader, you are," he says when she sits down and pulls her bowl of oatmeal toward her.

Lyme nearly drops her spoon. It's not that she disagrees - she's bigger than Dale and more aggressive even if she can be more subtle than the Capitol thinks she can - but that Nero's the one saying it. She'd been expecting a fight. Two girls aren't ever pack leaders, not even their victors; they find the alpha male and stick close to him, making sure they're the second on everyone's kill list, and then they swoop in after the alliance breaks and make their move. Lyme doesn't think she could pull that off.

"I'm not saying you walk all over him," Nero warns her. "You're still a team, but he's not the one you're going to jockey with. One boys usually have shitty attitudes toward girls, he's the one who's going to butt heads with you. You let him do it, but you make sure you win. He's never gonna like it, but you make him listen."

"Yes sir," Lyme says, and once again she has to fight to keep the confusion off her face.

"Here," Nero says, and tosses her a banana. "Watch your fruit intake."

Lyme hasn't had a raw banana in years; in the Centre they just blended them into her protein shakes, and she rubs one finger over the waxy skin before peeling it back. The sharp, fresh smell hits her, and Lyme swallows hard.

"There's peaches, too, I'll have them peel the skin off for lunch," Nero says, and Lyme is not a starving tribute from District Twelve who's never seen fresh fruit before, but it sticks in her throat anyhow. She concentrates on her food and doesn't look at Nero for the rest of breakfast.

That day in training, Lyme singles out the District One boy and jostles him in the shoulder, gives him a wolf's grin when he raises an eyebrow. "Race you to the top," she says, jerking her chin at the rock wall across the room.

He clicks his tongue. "That's a cheat, you monkeys are all about the rocks. May as well challenge a Four to swimming, it doesn't mean anything."

"Oh, well," Lyme drawls, rocking back on her heels and hooking her thumbs in her waistband. "If you're _scared_."

"Don't try to psych me into that shit, I'm not stupid," he says.

"So that's a fancy way of saying you're scared," Lyme shoots back, and he narrows his eyes. The talons of competition dig into her gut and twist, and she waits, grinning, while the One comes to the same conclusion.

"Fine," he says, tossing aside the netting he'd been half-heartedly tying into knots.

Rock-climbing was always Lyme's best recreational skill in the Centre, but she holds back, keeping her lead narrow and letting him pass her once or twice. It's too early in the game for flat-out humiliation, and she's trying to build a tenuous rivalry-bond, not grind his nose into the dirt. When she slaps her hand against the ceiling it's only a second before the One does, and he grunts to acknowledge her win but doesn't look like he's going to try to stick a knife in her leg to avenge his pride.

"Like I said," he grunts, dusting the chalk from his palms on the legs of his pants. "Challenge me to a real competition sometime, not a monkey game, we'll see how that goes."

At the end of the day, Lyme heads back upstairs with Dale, and they drop into their chairs at the dinner table, pleasantly tired but not exhausted, not at this stage. Nero and Adessa are there, and Lyme doesn't miss the bowl of skinned peaches sitting by her plate. "Good show today kids," Adessa says with a nod. "We got the footage of training down at mentor central. You're doing a great job already, so eat up and we'll go over your talking points for tomorrow."

"You look good out there," Nero says, and Lyme looks up. She still doesn't know what he's playing at, trying to win her over with compliments or what, but the worst part is she can't help feeling pleased anyhow. Only the obviousness of the manipulation keeps her from falling for it completely, and she just nods at him and goes back to eating.

* * *

The third full day of training, Nero pulls her aside before she heads downstairs. "Don't play all your cards," he says, and Lyme frowns in confusion. "Look, you're smart, smarter than most tributes who come through here. You're already a surprise because you're a girl built like one of the boys, so let them think that's all you've got, that's your surprise. Don't play smart. Stay away from any of the mental tests, just shrug them off like you think they don't matter."

Lyme narrows her eyes. "How do you know I'm smart?" she accuses. "Dale's smart. I'm the big bruiser. That's how they're playing us."

Nero cracks a smile, and it's nothing huge but it's different enough from his usual blank-faced calm that Lyme blinks. "I know because I'm not stupid either, little girl," he says.

Lyme jerks back. "Don't call me that," she bites out, and it takes all her strength not to put her hands up between them to keep him back. "Don't - just don't."

"All right," Nero says, and Lyme's breath is short and painful in her chest and her stomach is trying to escape through her ribcage. "But you need to focus. You can't let things shake you, they're going to say worse in the Arena and they'll be meaning to knock you off your game."

Lyme winces. "I'm going down," she says.

He's right. She's rattled, the ghost of her father breathing down her neck, and it makes her snappish and jittery, overreacting to the usual nonsense banter until the One girl snickers and asks if it's her time of the month. "If you even get one," the girl adds with a sneer.

Lyme knows she doesn't mean it any more than the rest of the jibes they throw at each other for the Gamemakers' benefit; she's just testing, sticking her toe in the water to see if there's anything under the surface that will bite her. Lyme pushes back her irritation and rolls her eyes instead. "Oh, right, because I look like a dude," she says, speaking exaggeratedly slowly. "That's clever. Did you come up with that all by yourself?"

One Girl snorts and tosses her braid over her shoulder, and Lyme lets out a slow breath.

That night at dinner they go over the day's findings, and confirm the alliance requests from the various district mentors. It's the standard Career alignment this year except for one. The surprise is a boy from Seven who's built big and strong from throwing axes, and he has enough of a fan base in the Capitol for his rustic charm that Adessa thinks they should consider it. Lyme wrinkles her nose but says nothing, just eats her food, and there are peaches by her plate again but this time she doesn't touch them no matter how good they smell.

Afterward, Nero leans back in his chair. "You two go on ahead," he says. "I wanna talk to Lyme."

Adessa nods. "Let's work on your throws," she says to Dale, and they disappear through the door into his room.

Lyme folds her arms, waiting for the lecture about her slip up this morning. Instead Nero just gets up, walks over to the sofa and gestures for her to follow him; when she does, sitting on the opposite end of the couch, he gives her a long, level look. "Did he call you that?" he asks.

Lyme freezes. "Who?" She doesn't bother asking Nero what he's talking about.

"The piece of shit who raised you," Nero says, and Lyme's eyes flick wide at the sudden venom in his voice. He doesn't sound like a mentor, smooth and professional; his voice curls in his throat, and his entire expression shifts and turns ugly. "He called you that, didn't he."

"Yeah," Lyme grits out. Her fingers twitch for the knife she's not allowed to have in the Games Complex. "What, was that not in my file? I thought you were supposed to know everything."

"I only know what you told the Centre," Nero says, and Lyme grunts. "But I know you don't trust me."

"I don't trust men," Lyme says, giving him a sharp look, because why not. Let it all out. In a few days she'll be in the Arena and none of it will matter anymore. "Don't take it personally." Nero says nothing, and the anger flares up inside her again. "Except that's in my file, right? No male stylists. No male prep team. So why do I have you?"

"Ah." Nero glances at the Avoxes, silent and unnerving in their red robes, like he's afraid they're going to talk. "Yeah, I think I owe you an answer to that. Because the thing is, you're going to have to trust me if you're going to listen. You'll need to trust me more than you trust yourself, so that you'll do what I tell you even when the rest of you freezes. You'll remember and follow what I said before you even know what you're doing. And I can't do that with you fighting me."

"I wouldn't have fought Adessa," Lyme says, and this is insane, this is suicide, talking back to a mentor like this, but Nero doesn't look mad, just thoughtful, and statistically speaking Lyme's dead anyway. She pushes the thought away. "Or Callista. Or any of the women. So why you? Did you draw straws?"

Nero shakes his head. "No, they were going to give you to one of the women, but right away I wanted you, and I fought for you the hardest."

Lyme goggles at him, and she fists her hands to stop herself from trying to find something to throw. "Why?" She has a bigger rant building up inside, but in the end that's the only word that makes it past the chokehold in her throat. She's not sure whether she wants him to convince her or not; she's parched with thirst and staring at a puddle of water that might save her or kill her faster, and the only way to find out is to drink.

A pause; this time Nero checks the door to Dale's room, firmly closed. "I looked in your file and I saw a seven-year-old kid with a busted-up nose and a broken arm," he says, and Lyme winces. The Centre took a lot of photos over the years; she'd assumed only the nice ones made it in.

She doesn't like the idea of her mentor seeing a picture of her at her smallest and weakest and deciding that he felt sorry for her. "So you felt bad?" Lyme says, the words tasting bitter on her tongue. "You wanted to protect me, be my new dad, what?"

"Let's just say I know what it's like to have someone control you by beating you until you're big enough to hit back," Nero says, and oh. Lyme opens her mouth and closes it again. It's hard to imagine Nero small enough to intimidate physically; even to Lyme now, he looks like a mountain. "I was twelve when I pushed my old man down the stairs and snapped his neck for good measure when he hit the bottom."

A warm glow spreads through Lyme's core, out to her limbs; she imagined doing that so many times, or maybe just putting some apples or toys on the steps on the days her father came home drunk. "What did he do?"

"He got my half-sister pregnant," Nero says, just like that, and Lyme sucks in a breath. "So look, maybe I understand better than most that men can be shitty, shitty human beings, and the ones we're supposed to count on most of all. And maybe I didn't like the thought of someone as strong and brave as you going through thinking she had nobody to count on." He clenches his hands into fists. "I saw your file and I couldn't not have you. Not when you'd never find a mentor who understands just what you did to get here better than me."

Any Career knows how to deal with their emotions, to put them aside when necessary, but it's been a long time since Lyme has had to try so hard not to let them swamp her. "What happened to your sister?" she asks instead.

"She kept the baby," Nero says with a small smile. "I send her money every month. Haven't seen her since the Justice Building when she said I'd scared her to death and asked me not to try to see her if I made it out, for the sake of her kid." Nero hesitates, then says, "He's your age, stayed the hell away from the Program." Finally he looks at her, and his gaze pins Lyme to the sofa. "And all right, call me selfish, but maybe this time I'd like to save someone I get to keep."

Lyme lets out a long breath. "This can't be standard mentor procedure. You're supposed to be aloof."

Nero actually laughs, though it's not at her. "You're damn right it's not. But respect and distance only works if you know and trust I've got your back. All the professionalism in the world isn't going to help if you think I'm only in it because I get off on telling girls what to do. Yeah, you heard me, don't think I don't know what you're thinking." He leans forward, resting his forearms against his knees. "But let me tell you something. That piece of shit father of yours, I'm betting he called you 'little girl' as a way to put you down. Joke's on him, though, because I think that's the bravest thing anybody could ever be."

Lyme blinks double-time, annoyed that someone decided to turn the lights extra bright and glaring for the last half of the conversation. "Well, that's nice and all," she says. "But maybe you should tell me what I need to do for my private session tomorrow."

"Now we're talking," Nero says, grinning, and tentatively, Lyme grins back.

* * *

For her private session, Nero tells her to showcase her stealth.

Lyme frowns. "How do you know I'm good at that?" she asks him, but this time it's genuine curiosity, not a challenge. She doesn't remember it factoring big into her time at the Centre, but then again she's not the one paid to analyze the students. He's right, though; in her Field Exam she moved through the woods without cracking a branch as long as she wasn't running. Maybe he's seen that footage.

Nero raises an eyebrow and tilts his head, and something about the set of his mouth, the unhappy curve at the end, tells her this is just between them. "You had a dad who used to smack you around," he says. "You're telling me you didn't learn to be quiet?"

Lyme sits back. "I guess I never thought of it that way," she says, looking at Nero sidelong, but he doesn't rub it in or say something supercilious about how that's what mentors are for, just nods.

"You're smart, and you're stealthy," he says. "They already know you're big and good with swords, and they'll expect to see it, but you have to be more than that. Show them everything you are, not just what people see when they first look at you. Don't try to be over-clever. This isn't about the score; it's about showing them what you can do, what you're going to do. The score is only part of the picture."

The last two victors from Two got scores of nine and ten; no way is Lyme making anything less than that, but she knows the risks of an eleven. District Two won the 49th, 51st and 52nd games, and tributes aren't supposed to do the math but Lyme can't help it. She'll have to play it smart if she's going to keep them from being bored.

"You can do this," Nero says, and the thing is that when he says it she believes it, or at least that he does; he sits forward and the lines of his body go taut, his expression sharp and intense as he holds her there with his eyes. "There's no telling what you'll have in the Arena, but here, you control this. This is your show. I want you to let them see you're everything they want."

Later that day, Lyme slips into the room as Dale is on his way out. The Gamemakers sit at the far end of the room, chatting with each other and comparing notes; there's a large breakfast spread on the tables in front of them, and they don't notice as Lyme moves through the various stations to the front of the room, keeping herself out of sight. She slips a hatchet from the rack of weapons, and with a sharp turn, hurls it across the room. Axes aren't her weapon but she's good enough at them, and it spins end over end and lands with a heavy _thunk_ in the torso of a dummy.

The Gamemakers' heads snap around to look at her, and Lyme gives them a brief nod but doesn't stop. She has fifteen minutes, and during the final months when the more dangerous training tapered off - it's a lot of paperwork if the chosen Volunteer dies before the Reaping - she and Dale were drilled on using that time to the second until Lyme can mark the seconds in her head with someone else in the room counting backwards down by threes.

Lyme runs through swords and clubs first, her chosen melee weapons, ones that look good with her strong shoulders and muscled arms, and though it's not her specialty she throws spears to show them she has range. She stays away from daggers and throwing knives because those are for the smaller tributes, like the Ones - Dale this year has chosen dual-wielding daggers as his iconic look - but she makes sure to use her weapons in sharp, precise ways. She's not just picking up a mace and smashing things; Lyme takes out the dummy's kneecaps and other strategic weak points before finishing with a blow to the head.

FInally, Lyme heads for the ribbon zone, where long, thin strips of fabric stretch across the floor and through the air in criss-crossed patterns, small bells strung along the lines. Lyme takes a breath, centres herself, and moves through the course, slipping over and under the ribbons without setting off any of the bells. It's the hardest thing she's done since coming here, and by the end, when she balances on one leg and pivots, three limbs extended, to clear the last obstacle, her hair is damp at the back of her neck.

Once she's clear, Lyme sweeps back up to standard position and lowers herself into a bow, then waits for dismissal.

Lyme, the boy from One, and the girl from Four all score tens. Lyme clicks her tongue against her teeth, sulking down in her chair, but Nero gives her a look and she sits back up, albeit with a scowl. Dale, at least, only scored a nine, but he seems happy with it, and what's more, so does Adessa. Lyme recalls Nero reminding her that scores aren't everything, and the first real drumroll of competition starts up in her chest. It's almost time.

Nero slaps his hand against his thigh. "Time for sleep," he says, and that's as good as an order.

They might have given her a standard Career score, but Lyme saw them, in the flashing glances she spared between moves, and they were watching her, eyes narrowed. She'd impressed them, but they were giving her the very chance she needed: the chance to be one of the crowd until it's time to strike. Lyme falls asleep with a smile on her face.

* * *

The smile sticks under her skin for all of the next day, even though Lyme's angle is serious and deadpan to contrast against the giggling girl from One and the surprisingly charming farmer's daughter from Ten. Her interview goes down perfectly, and afterward Nero claps her on the shoulder in congratulations and Lyme doesn't even flinch.

"You looked great up there," he tells her, and paint her purple and call her an amethyst but Lyme actually feels a glow of pride when he smiles at her. It's a little embarrassing that all it took to get through the years and years of bitterness is a little praise, but then again, that just means her father was a dick, not that Nero is a magical worker.

The smile lasts until she goes to bed and it hits her that this is it, this is the final night. Lyme brushes her fingers over the sheets, and the thought wiggles its way under her fingernails that this could be the last bed she ever sleeps in. As soon as she thinks that, a whole pile of others come tumbling down like a rockslide, giving Lyme a never ending list of lasts: tomorrow morning's shower, tonight's dinner, the view from her window.

Lyme isn't used to fear. It's been years since she felt it truly - not just fear of disappointment, or of failure, but real, bone-crushing terror - and for a minute she doesn't remember what it is. She lies in the bed the size of her room for the first three years of Residential, unable to move, while a cold sweat breaks out over her skin and her breathing tightens. For a second she wonders if she's having a heart attack.

She's good - the best scores in the Centre across two years - but in the Arena that doesn't mean anything. In the 51st, the boy from Two died two seconds into the Games, when the mines around his platform failed to deactivate. Before that, in the 50th, they lost three of their four tributes when the volcano erupted and took out the Career camp. In the 49th, Brutus' district partner died in an earthquake when the ground gave out under her. None of them could have saved themselves; the Arena is as capricious as it is cruel, and sometimes when it decides to take a tribute there's nothing they can do.

What if, after years of training, of enduring her father's blows and her mother's averted gazes, of training and starvation and endurance, of killing four criminals with her bare hands or a single blade, Lyme dies because of an avalanche, or a flood, or because they send a poisoned snake to sting her while she sleeps?

The darkness presses down on her like a physical thing, and it takes all Lyme's strength to push herself up to a sitting position and slide out of bed. Once her feet hit the floor it's like she triggered some kind of spell, and suddenly Lyme can't move fast enough, shooting out of her room and willing the door to shut faster. She presses her back against the smooth metal, eyes closed and breathing hard, and when she looks out at the room there's Nero on the sofa, watching her.

Lyme freezes, but Nero just moves to the corner, waving a hand. "Come on out and sit down," he says, and it would be stupid just to run back into her room, so Lyme does. She wants to pull her knees up to her chest but she can't, not with that the universal symbol for being a baby.

Nero watches for a minute, then he calls over an Avox and has her bring them two mugs of hot chocolate. Lyme holds the mug in both hands, looking down at the thick brown liquid, and the heady scent of it fills her senses. "That's not on the diet plan," Lyme says, accusing.

Nero chuckles. "I won't tell if you won't," he says, and he doesn't wink but something in his voice makes it sound like one.

The Capitol is famous for its decadent meals, and the Games Complex has the best food replicators in the city, rumour has it, but Twos never get to find out because the Centre sends a pre-approved menu ahead of time for the tributes to follow. Every calorie is accounted for, every meal a carefully-designed mix of proteins and carbohydrates designed to keep them fresh and ready while packing on the weight so it won't hit them as hard once they're starving in the wilderness. Hot chocolate is nothing but empty sugars.

Lyme can't remember the last time she had it. Maybe it's a trick, but then Nero leans back and takes a long sip of his. Her heart hammers, but Lyme does the same, and the flavour is rich and decadent and feels like it should be illegal, and she burns her tongue in her haste to try it a second time. Nero doesn't say anything, just quirks a smile at her.

"I'm gonna tell you a secret," he says, tapping his finger against the edge of his mug. "Everybody gets scared."

Lyme gives him a flat-eyed look. She might have just given herself a mini panic attack, but that doesn't mean she needs platitudes. "Please," she says, barely keeping the irritation from her tone. Just because Nero gave her cocoa doesn't mean she can sass him.

Nero points two fingers at his eyes, then at her, then back again in an 'I'm watching you' gesture. "You really think I'm going to waste the last night lying to you?" he asks. "I'm serious. Everyone is scared. If you're not that means you're way too cocky, and likely as not you're going to make a stupid mistake five minutes in that'll cost you big time. Scared is good. It's terror you gotta watch out for. The right amount of fear keeps you focused; too much and you freeze. You just have to find the balance. The easiest way to do that is to remember why you're here."

Lyme frowns and picks at a loose thread in the hem of her sleep shirt. "I'm here to bring pride to my district," she says, and she's not parroting, exactly because she means it, she does - she owes everything in her life to the Centre that gave her control over it, even if it means giving all of that away in the end - but at the same time, it doesn't fill her with the glowing fire of purpose that it usually does.

"Yes," Nero says. "We're all here to serve the Capitol and to remind the country why we have the Games. But that's not all. You're here because you're the best. Because you fought non-stop for over ten years while over a hundred other kids gave up. Good kids, smart kids. Strong kids." He stops, makes sure Lyme's paying attention. "Prettier kids. You're better than all of them. And just because it's the Capitol's right to take it all away in a second doesn't mean you didn't earn it in the first place."

Lyme twists her shirt around her fingers. The fear is still there, lurking, the loss of control like a shark swimming beneath the water. "A lot of things go wrong in the Arena," she says, hesitant, because in the Centre an admission of weakness like that would get her laps and pushups until she physically couldn't walk anymore.

"I know," Nero says. "And some of them, can't anything be done about them and that's that, and a good Career knows how to swallow the fear of things we can't control. But the ones that can - well, I'll be doing everything I can to help you. You know why?"

It's an obvious answer, the kind of thing that in school all the kids would hang back, glancing at each other, afraid that there's a trick. "Because you're my mentor," Lyme says finally, when Nero doesn't keep going or make to answer the question for her.

"Damn right." Nero sets down his mug on the table. "And because you're my girl and that means my job is to move heaven and earth to bring you home."

Lyme has a fuzzy memory of her father using possessive phrases like that to her mother, scowling and slamming his hand against the wall while she flinched. With him it was a threat, a promise of ownership and control and a million other things that meant he had the power to do whatever he wanted. With Nero it doesn't sound like that. With Nero it sounds like an honour every bit as great as the one sitting on Lyme's shoulders, and Nero has sat in this room with a tribute five times that Lyme can remember and not brought home a single one of them. Lyme wonders what it would be like to be a mentor's first.

Nero shifts, and he holds out one hand, slow and deliberate, like the time Lyme saw a stray dog down behind the shop and tried to pet it, before it snapped at her and took off in the other direction. Lyme sits still, every instinct screaming in her to run, and it's stupid that she knows a hundred ways to kill a man but she still freezes when one tries to touch her. Finally Nero lets his hand rest on the back of her neck, but instead of gripping and pushing down, digging into her skin and leaving bruises, he runs his fingers through the short hair at the base of her skull, rubs his thumb over the pressure point behind her ear.

"I believe in you," he says, quiet and solemn. "You're going to go out there and you're going to win the Games, and I'll be watching over you whole time. You're not a kid anymore, fighting all alone while everybody looks the other way. You've got a mentor, and that means you never have to be alone again."

And that's the thing, isn't it. Even if she dies alone - because millions of viewers don't count, not when they don't actually care about her or know her name or that she likes the sound of rain pattering against the windowpane with thunder rolling safely in the distance - she won't really be alone, because Nero will be there. Nero will grieve for her, take her loss into him like he has all the kids he failed to save. Lyme lets out a long breath and tips her head back, leaning into the reassurance of his touch.

"I'm going for the record," Lyme tells him. "Highest any Two's ever made was nine."

Nero chuckles, and he ruffles her hair. "You just worry about getting out of there and let the records take care of themselves."

"I'm just saying," Lyme says, and it hits her that she wants to make him proud. She actually cares about doing right by him, proving his faith in her has basis, and she's glad she's sitting otherwise her legs would have buckled.

"I believe you." Nero snorts. "Now bed, missy, you've got a big day tomorrow."

Lyme makes a face at him, and Nero claps a hand to the side of her face and gives her an affectionate shake.

* * *

The heat rises off the pavement like a sea of magma. Lyme stands in her Arena uniform with Nero at her shoulder, looking out at the hovercraft.

"Come back to me now, you hear?" Nero says, his voice hard with the tone of command. "Do what you need to do."

Lyme nods and walks away. She's pictured herself in this position for ten years, and in her daydreams she strode proud and strong to the hovercraft, not looking back at her mentor, because who needed that? Babies, that's who. But this time, something stops her, slows her down and makes her turn and squint back at him, her hand shading her eyes. "My name was Madeline," she blurts out, glad the whine of the engines will keep her words safe from the cameras.

That's not in her file; the Centre promised, and she checked once to make sure. Nero blinks once, twice, then nods. "Good to know," he says.

"I just." Lyme shrugs, embarrassment beating at her chest. It's stupid, but if she dies, she wants someone to remember the girl who died first so she could be here. "I thought someone should know."

Nero lifts his hand in the District Two salute. "Go get 'em."

Lyme returns the gesture. "Yes sir," she says, and this time as she heads for the hovercraft she does her ten-year-old self proud.

* * *

Just under three weeks later Nero sits by her bed. "Welcome back, little girl," he says, his voice hoarse.

Lyme's fingers twitch on the blanket. Nero reaches over and grips her hand, and slowly, slowly, Lyme finds the strength to squeeze back. "I got ten," she croaks. The words burn in her throat.

"I know you did." Nero runs his thumb over the backs of her knuckles. "You're in the record books already."

Lyme closes her eyes, and she's dehydrated and dizzy so her eyes itch but nothing comes out. "It doesn't feel like I thought it would." She thought she'd feel like a Victor, full of pride and warmth and glory, but all she feels is tired. Tired and sick and off-balance, like the whole world is a set of stairs with the last step missing. She wants to wash her hands, scrub at them until the skin sloughs off.

"Never does," Nero says. "But that's a problem we can fix, now that you're safe." He stands up, bends and kisses her forehead, and Lyme should protest except she's exhausted and floating on clouds and if Nero lets go of her she'll float away. She must have mumbled something, because Nero keeps his hold on her with one hand, and reaches up with the other to brush her hair off her forehead. "I'm not going anywhere."

When she wakes up the next time he's still there, a bowl of peaches - with the skins this time, drizzled with thick, heavy cream and sprinkled with cinnamon - beside him on the table. "Here," Nero says, and helps her hold the bowl steady while he adjusts the pillows behind her back.

The peaches taste like summer, which is an idiotic thing to think and even stupider thing to say out loud. Lyme's about to blame it on the medication when Nero grins. "I know what you mean," he says.


End file.
